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SEEING LIFE WHOLE 

A Christian Philosophy of Life 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DAJLLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 




SEEING LIFE WHOLE 

A Christian Philosophy of Life 


THE DEEMS LECTURES 
FOR 1922 

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 


BY 

HENRY CHURCHILL KING 

*. 

PRESIDENT OF OBERLIN COLLEGE 



gotfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1923 


All rights reserved 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


3H + 3 ! 

.K+3- 


Copyright, 1923, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and printed. Published September, 1923. 


Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 
New York, U. S. A. 


SEP 26’23 




PREFACE 


This book had its origin in an invitation from New 
York University to give the lectures for 1922 on the 
Deems Foundation. The character of the Lectureship, 
growing out of “The Institute of Christian Philosophy,” 
practically determined the scope of the lectures, as indi¬ 
cated in the secondary title of the book—A Christian 
Philosophy of Life. At the same time this determination 
of general subject has made it impossible for me alto¬ 
gether to avoid traversing ground covered in certain of 
my other books. But I have sought a fresh treatment 
throughout in the presentation of material both by the 
special consideration of questions just now pressing upon 
many minds, and by applying to the entire discussion the 
much needed principle of “seeing life whole.” This prin¬ 
ciple thus constitutes the main title of the book. In a 
practical application of that principle, it will be seen, I 
have aimed to give a sixfold approach to the problem of a 
Christian philosophy of life—the scientific approach, the 
psychological approach, the value approach, the personal 
and ethical approach, the philosophical approach, and 
the Biblical and Christian approach. It has been hoped 
so to show the close and vital relations of the most signifi¬ 
cant lines of modern thought to Christian living and think¬ 
ing. This has compelled in preparation a many-sided 
review of material, that in so brief a discussion has been 



vi Preface 

reflected perhaps even more in what has been omitted 
than in what has been said. All that one can do in such 
an attempt is to say as honestly as he can how these 
questions best come home to himself. 

Henry Churchill King 
Oberlin College, February, 1923. 


I. 

II. 

III. 


I. 

II. 

III. 


IV. 


I. 

II. 

III. 

IV. 
V. 


VI. 

VII. 

VIII. 


CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION 

Necessity of an Ever Renewed Apologetic 
Constant Endeavor to See Life Whole . 
A Variety of Approaches to Our Problem 


PAGE 

1 

4 

6 


CHAPTER I 

THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH 

The Scientific Field, Spirit, and Method .... 8 

Reasons for Beginning with the Scientific Approach 9 

The Contributions of Modern Science to the Ideal 
Interests.11 

The Difficulties for the Religious View Arising 
from Evolution.19 


CHAPTER II 

THE psychological approach 

The Significant Breadth of the More Modern Psy¬ 
chology .29 

No Quarrel with Such a Definition of Psychology 30 

Behaviorism in Psychology.32 

Great Practical Inferences from Modern Psychology 35 

The Moral and Religious Significance of These 
Great Inferences.37 

The Psychological Inferences Are Indubitably Chris¬ 
tian Emphases.40 

Psychology Has Much Help to Give to Practical 
Religion—The Psychological Conditions of Self- 
Mastery .41 

The Christian Mastery of One’s Fears and Anxieties 46 

vii 









viii Contents 

CHAPTER III 

THE VALUE APPROACH 

I. The Importance of the Point of View of Value . 

II. We Are Commonly Introduced into the Values of 
Life Through the Testimony of Others .... 

III. The Necessity of Absolute Honesty. 

IV. The Necessity of Modesty. 

V. Staying Persistently in the Presence of the Best 

VI. A Broajd Analogy Between the Realms of Value 

CHAPTER IV 

THE PERSONAL AND ETHICAL APPROACH 

I. The Principle of Reverence for Personality . 

II. Our Whole Constitution Looks to Personal Rela¬ 
tions . 

III. Reverence for Personality Includes Self-Respect 

IV. Respect for the Liberty of Others. 

V. Reverence for the Sanctity of the Other’s Inner 
Personality. 

CHAPTER V 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH 

I. Tendency to Underrate Philosophy. 

II. Definitions of the Sphere of Philosophy .... 

III. Fundamental Philosophic Points of View .... 

x 1. The Organic View of Truth. 

2. The Tests of Truth or Reality. 

3. The Three Spheres of Reality—the Is , the Must , 

and the Ought . 

4. The Three Great Ideals of Truth, Goodness, and 

Beauty. 

5. The Mission of Mechanism. 

IV. The Problem of the Possible Harmony of Process and 

Meaning. 

V. Two Further Philosophical Considerations 

1. One’s Own Self the Best Key for Understanding 

of the Universe. 

2. The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life . 


PAGE 

53 

56 

62 

65 

67 

72 


75 

78 

80 

88 

94 


104 

106 

110 

110 

111 

118 

119 

121 

123 

128 

129 

130 














Contents 


IX 


CHAPTER VI 

THE BIBLICAL AND CHRISTIAN APPROACH 

PAGE 

I. The Christian View of the Bible .133 

II. Present-Day Obstacles to a Biblical Approach to a 

Christian Philosophy of Life .137 

1. The Doctrine of the Inerrancy of the Scriptures . 137 

2. An Extreme Apocalypticism.143 

3. Spiritualism .144 

4. Christian Science.148 

5. A False Type of Mysticism.148 

III. The Christian Way of Seeing Life Whole. “By 
Every Word That Proceedeth Out of the Mouth 
of God” .151 

1. Not by Bread Alone.152 

2. Not by Marvel and Ecstasy Alone.155 











SEEING LIFE WHOLE 

A Christian Philosophy of Life 






SEEING LIFE WHOLE 


A Christian Philosophy of Life 

INTRODUCTION 

There is always needed a constantly renewed apologetic 
for the ideal life,—for all our ideals, for truth, goodness 
and beauty, for religion, for the Christian view of God 
and the world. All ideals are alike concerned. Persist¬ 
ently and with every change in knowledge men press the 
vital questions: Have the world and life abiding meaning 
and value? Can w T e, in the midst of an evolving world, 
' keep our faith in the conservation and the progress of 
values ? This is the problem of this Lectureship. 

i 

Such an ever renewed apologetic for the great values 
of life is needed for several reasons. 

First of all, such a new apologetic is needed to express 
the reality and meaning of our ideal interests in the terms 
of our own times; even though there be no essential change 
in viewpoints. For each period has its ow r n favorite ways 
of putting things, and one of the best evidences of the 
vitality of a man’s ideal or religious convictions is to be 
found in his desire constantly to re-translate these con¬ 
victions into immediately current terms. These changing 


i 



2 


Seeing Life Whole 

terms may trouble those who are quite content with the 
old terms, and they may wish that the changing genera¬ 
tion were alike content. But in fact such changes in the 
putting of a man’s beliefs are real causes for congratula¬ 
tion for all; for they mean genuine independent interest 
in the great values, and no mere indifferent willingness 
passively to take over the formulas of others. 

A changing apologetic for all our ideals is also needed 
because of constantly growing knowledge , and the con¬ 
sequent wisdom, if not the necessity, of relating the ex¬ 
pression of our ideals to this whole of knowledge. One of 
the best justifications of any ideal interest is its ability to 
adapt itself to changing conditions. And this needs to be 
repeatedly shown for our full peace of mind. 

An ever renewed apologetic is demanded, too, to meet 
incidentally any special new questions arising; although 
these questions are generally new chiefly in form, when we 
look deeply enough into them. In this discussion, then, 
we are to seek to meet as clearly and definitely as possible 
the present-day obstacles to a Christian philosophy of 
life. These obstacles come both from within and from 
without the ranks of intentional defenders of the faith. 
For the worst enemies of a cause are sometimes to be 
found among its unwise friends. The new present-day 
questions, too, grow naturally right out of the new inner 
world of thought—the world of modern science and its 
evolutionary point of view, of the historical spirit, of the 
new psychology, of sociology, of comparative religion. A 
perfectly enormous mass of new knowledge and new points 
of view—illustrated in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and 
Ethics—has thus poured in upon the men of the last hun¬ 
dred years; and it is not strange that the ideal interests 
have even yet not been able wholly to assimilate it. We 
cannot evade facing this new inner world of thought, 


Introduction 


3 


and seeing what it means for our ideal interests, and espe¬ 
cially for our religious and Christian faiths. 

An adequate meeting of the questions so raised—it is 
more and more plain—requires not simply a lean-to for 
our traditional philosophy and theology, but to some 
extent a reorganization of the whole architectural plan 
of our apologetic for the ideal and religious interests. 
Too largely men tend to keep their ideas, old and new, in 
water-tight compartments, not introducing them to one 
another, and so attaining no organic unity in their living 
and thinking. And this is likely to be particularly true, 
where many fields of knowledge and questions of faith are 
concerned. In such a case, certainly, the ideal apologetic 
cannot be simply an offensive attack; it must be open- 
minded toward all the facts, and be able to explain the 
difficulties felt, and to embody the full measure of truth 
the new knowledge contains. For on both sides, where 
men have tenaciously insisted on a position taken, we may 
be sure there is some element of vital truth involved, which 
needs fully to be taken into account. 

Moreover, the problem for both theoretical and practi¬ 
cal faith is constantly a new and critical one; as, for 
example, both Romanes and Huxley illustrated, from dif¬ 
ferent points of view, in their moral and religious diffi¬ 
culties with the evolution theory. Lotze long ago put the 
matter with precision: “We can never look on indiffer¬ 
ently when we see cognition undermining the foundations 
of faith, or faith calmly putting aside as a whole that 
which scientific zeal has built up in detail.” 1 Either 
course brings inevitable rupture into a man’s inner life. 
There are great values to be preserved on both sides. 
Christian Science gives an almost perfect example of the 
second danger Lotze names: “Faith calmly putting aside 

1 Mxcrocosvms, p. xi. 


4 Seeing Life Whole 

as a whole that which scientific zeal has built up in 
detail.” 

The need of an ever new apologetic for the ideal in¬ 
terests corresponds , also , to the importance of new vari¬ 
ations in organic evolution. For as Hoffding suggests: 
“If new variations can arise, not only in organic but per¬ 
haps also in inorganic nature, new tasks are placed before 
the human mind.” Darwin “has shown us forces and 
tendencies in nature which make absolute systems im¬ 
possible, at the same time that they give us new objects 
and problems. There is still a place for what Lessing 
called ‘the unceasing striving after truth, 5 while ‘absolute 
truth 5 (in the sense of a closed system) is unattainable 
so long as life and experience are going on.” 2 

All this quite fits man as himself a growing creature, 
and as having in each case an individuality which itself 
may become a “favorable variation. 55 From this point of 
view an adequate apologetic for Christianity, for ex¬ 
ample, should be and can be no mere logically skilful 
defense of long settled formulas; but should help rather 
to a constantly enlarging and deepening and progres¬ 
sively successful putting of the Christian values,—to the 
constructive task of making clear Christianity’s power 
of adaptability to changing environments, power to grow 
as science itself grows. 


n 

Now such a conception of a Christian apologetic neces¬ 
sarily involves a constant endeavor to see life steadily 
and to see it whole. 

In one of his early sonnets, addressed to a friend w r ho 

2 Evolution in Modern Thought, pp. 211-213; Essay by Hoffding on 
The Influence of the Conception of Evolution on Modern Philosophy. 


Introduction 


5 


asked him who “prop” his mind, “in these bad days,” 
Matthew Arnold expresses gratitude to Homer and Epic¬ 
tetus, but most of all to Sophocles whom he characterizes 
as one 

Who saw life steadily and saw it whole. 

There have been few definitions of rational thinking and 
living more suggestive or more adequate than this char¬ 
acterization of Sophocles. For to see life steadily and to 
see it whole might be called a definition of philosophy in 
its entirety, and of both the end and the process of edu¬ 
cation. 

We are to make sure, then, above all, in any adequate 
apologetic for life’s greatest values, that we are not 
ignoring whole spheres of life, or any of its essential 
facts. It is illustrative of this danger that, when thirty 
writers recently undertook to discuss “The Civilization of 
the United States,” and in many lines to point the way for 
• the rest of us, it did not seem to the group worth while 
to deal independently with religion at all. As the editor 
said in his preface: “They were not interested in the 
topic.” Had not Norman Thomas reason for saying, 
“The omission and the apology for it are a measure of the 
superficiality of the work as a whole”? 

The need of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole is 
both a scientific and an ideal contention. On the one 
hand, it is a part of science’s insistence on facing the 
facts (not simply theories) and all the facts, since we 
cannot be sure a 'priori which facts may prove themselves 
most important;—the insistence on making room in one’s 
hypothesis for all the facts which are to be accounted for. 

On the other hand, this determination to see life whole 
is the essence of all ideal views; for these all deal with 
the unity and meaning of the entire world, and hence 


6 


Seeing Life Whole 

cannot leave out of account the whole. All the ideals 
require somewhere this vision of wholeness. It is a poet 
who in these troublous days has lost this faith, who thus 
explains his own present dumbness: “A synthesis of some 
sort is behind all good verse. Poetry lives in a cosmos. A 
spiritual order is its soil.” So Professor Irving Babbitt 
too says: “The final test of creative work is the whole¬ 
ness and centrality of its vision.” In like manner, religion 
must say with ever renewed emphasis, as Dr. Newman 
Smyth prophetically put it years ago: “The whole man, 
in the entirety of his being, is the organ of spiritual, as * 
he is, also, of earthly feelings and experiences.” 3 

There can be, thus, no adequate putting of the great 
values in any narrow provincial fashion. There can be 
no exclusiveness. For the dangers of breadth are best 
guarded against by still greater breadth—by wholeness. 
Men are far more likely to be right in what they affirm 
than in what they deny. 


m 

In the interests of wholeness, then,—to insure seeing’ 
life steadily and seeing it whole,—in this constructive task 
of putting the great values especially of religion in their 
full setting, we may well attempt a variety of approaches 
to our problem. 

The following approaches to our study of the abiding 
significance of religion in both thought and life are thus 
naturally suggested: the general scientific approach; the 
psychological approach; the value approach; the per¬ 
sonal and ethical approach; the philosophical approach; 
the Biblical and Christian approach. 

The general scientific approach should point out the 
8 The Religious Feeling, p. 142. 



Introduction 


7 


positive contributions of modern science to the ideal in¬ 
terests, and face the difficulties felt in the evolution point 
of view. 

The psychological approach—as a particularly signifi¬ 
cant part of the general scientific approach—should sug¬ 
gest the great practical and ideal inferences from modern 
psychology, and deal with the questions arising from 
behavioristic psychology. 

The value approach should indicate the significant, uni¬ 
fied way into all the great values of life, bringing out thus 
the unity of all these values, and the way to constantly 
enriching life, personal and social. 

The personal and ethical approach points out the su¬ 
preme significance both for morals and religion of the 
principle of reverence for personality, as the basis for 
both a true individualism and a true socialism. 

The philosophical approach—for philosophy is the 
primary interpreter of the facts which science in the 
broadest sense brings us—attempts to put into brief 
compass the fundamental philosophical points of view, 
especially as concerns religion, and to face the philo¬ 
sophical difficulties for the religious viewpoint, just now 
most felt. 

The Biblical and Christian approach takes up the pres¬ 
ent-day obstacles to a Christian philosophy of life, gath¬ 
ering especially about the Scriptures and other religious 
viewpoints, and strives to bring out the wholeness of 
Christ’s vision of life, and his abiding significance for the 


race. 


CHAPTER I 


THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH 

I 

We need to be clear, to begin with, exactly what the 
viewpoint of modern science is. 

In the first place, the growth and triumphs of modern 
science are due in no small degree to the threefold self¬ 
restriction of its field: 1 the restriction to phenomena, 
“the thing as it appears,” abandoning all attempt to 
reach ultimate reality; the restriction to the tracing of 
purely immediate causal connections, to the question of 
the How, not the Why, to process not meaning; the 
restriction to experience, abandoning all a priori deter¬ 
mination. These three self-restrictions of modern science, . 
strictly defined, mean that modern science turns over all 
questions of ultimate reality , all questions of ultimate 
origins , all questions of final meaning to Philosophy or 
Theology or some other form of ideal view. 

This delimitation of the field of modern science illus¬ 
trates and carries with it also the conception of the scien¬ 
tific spirit. For the restriction to experience will yield 
results only in the degree in which one is absolutely true to 
experience. The scientific spirit so required, therefore, 
may be said to be the habitual determination to see the 
facts straight, without bias or prejudice; to report ex¬ 
actly the phenomena so found; and in the whole experi- 

^f. Lotze, Microcosmus, Vol. II, pp. 342 if.; Thomson, Outline 
of Science, pp. 1172-1175. 


8 


9 


The Scientific Approach 

ence to give an absolutely honest reaction upon the situ¬ 
ation under examination. It is a rigorous ideal, only 
partially attainable at best, and we shall need to return 
to it again. 

The field and spirit of modern science naturally lead 
on to the scientific method. Its essence is in accurate 
observation and directed experiment; but it needs a fuller 
characterization, if it is to be clearly understood. The 
scientific method may be said to begin in accurate obser¬ 
vation of the phenomenon under examination, to get at 
the raw facts; to go on by sagacious analysis to a pre¬ 
liminary classification of similar data; to discern the 
forms of behavior of these classified groups; so to frame 
an hypothesis that aims to include all the facts; then to 
verify and to develop this hypothesis by directed experi¬ 
ment (or to find that the hypothesis must be abandoned) ; 
to get at, thus, the laws which are found to hold for the 
phenomenon investigated; to perceive the conditions in¬ 
volved in these laws; to fulfill these conditions; and so to 
be able to come to practical mastery of the forces and 
resources of the field under investigation. 

It is to be noted that this conception of modern science 
does not at all confine it to the physical sciences. The 
whole viewpoint—field, spirit, method—may be applied, 
as we shall see, to any sphere of human experience—to 
psychology, to history, to the study of social phenomena, 
to the history of religions, etc. 

n 

With such a view of modei'n science, we naturally begin 
•with the scientific approach to our entire problem, for 
several reasons. 

First of all, our age is preeminently a scientific age , and 



10 


Seeing Life Whole 

has been particularly influenced by scientific conceptions. 
Moreover, many of the most difficult questions for the 
ideal interests, and especially for religion, rise right out 
of modern science and its evolutionary point of view. 

Modern science, too, deals with one of the two great 
all-inclusive problems of understanding the world in its 
entirety , which we need to have clearly in mind from the 
start. For there are two questions which may always be 
asked concerning any phenomenon: First, How did it 
come to be?—the question of process, of immediate causal 
connection, of mechanical explanation—the question of 
science; second, What does it mean?—the question of 
meaning, of ideal interpretation—the question of philoso¬ 
phy, and of all the ideal interests. Take, for example, 
Paulsen’s illustration of a printed page, or Lotze’s illus¬ 
tration of a drama. Concerning each, two all-inclusive 
questions may be asked: How did it come to be? What 
does it mean?—the question of process and the question 
of meaning. Concerning the printed page we may ask all 
the questions involved in the process of its production— 
questions of paper making, of typesetting-machine, of 
manufacture and working of the printing press, of the 
mechanical preparation of the “copy” for the page, etc. 
These are entirely proper and important questions, but 
after they have all been asked, there is another entirely 
different question to ask: What does the page mean, what 
were the ideas which the writer had in mind in the prepa¬ 
ration of his copy, what meaning did he intend to convey 
to his readers? The answer to the question of process 
does not at all answer the question of meaning. In like 
manner, one may know all the mysteries of stage ma¬ 
chinery and production from first to last, and have no 
answer to the question of the meaning of the drama so 
staged—of the idea or impression the dramatist meant to 


11 


The Scientific Approach 

get over the footlights to those who witnessed his play. 
So everywhere in scientific research—in physics, chem¬ 
istry, biology, etc.—science, if it truly confines itself to 
the field of science, is dealing solely with questions of 
fact and process, leaving the question of meaning to the 
ideal viewpoints. Philosophy and religion, on the other 
hand, as such, have nothing to do with these questions of 
fact and process. All these data they take from science 
and undertake the interpretation of their meaning . 2 

Now both these questions—of process and meaning— 
are essential, and neither in any way excludes the other; 
rather are they naturally supplementary, and not con¬ 
flicting. But the first question—that of process—is much 
the simpler, is necessarily preliminary, and can be clearly 
discriminated from the other question—that of meaning. 
Our whole problem will be helped by sharply distinguish¬ 
ing from the beginning these two questions and points of 
view in all our preliminary inquiries; although we may 
not stop finally with an ultimate dualism here. But the 
philosophical problem of unifying both points of view 
plainly belongs more appropriately to the philosophical 
approach to our entire problem. 

hi 

In turning now to the contributions of modern science 
to the ideal interests , it is worth noting, in the first place, 
how the scientific and the ideal points of view tend to fit 
into each other; for that will give us hope of a final solu¬ 
tion of the relations of modern science and the ideal in¬ 
terests. 

We may well take for our starting-point Herrmann’s 
definition of the moral law, as an idealist’s definition of the 
*Cf. Thomson, Outline of Science, pp. 1175-1179. 


12 


Seeing Life Whole 

ideal: “Mental and spiritual fellowship among men and 
mental and spiritual independence on the part of the 
individual—that is what we can ourselves recognize to be 
prescribed to us by the moral law.” 3 But while this 
definition of the moral law is, as has been said, an ideal' 
ist’s definition of the ideal, it still can be seen to express 
the essence of the scientific spirit and method. For on 
the one hand, Herrmann expresses for workers in the 
ideal realms what is essentially the method of Christ—the 
method of fellowship and independence, the method of the 
contagion of the good life, of the life sound at the core, of 
salt that has not lost its saltness, of light that has not 
gone out. At the same time he is also expressing the 
essential method for workers in science, with its demand 
for the open mind and absolute fidelity to the facts, cor¬ 
responding to mental and spiritual independence on the 
one hand; and its use of world-wide cooperation among 
scientific workers, corresponding to mental and spiritual 
fellowship on the other hand. 

Let one think, for example, of the way in which any 
scientific discovery, like that of the Roentgen rays, is 
tested and developed. As soon as the discovery was an¬ 
nounced probably the great majority of laboratories all 
over the world, which were equipped for this particular 
investigation, repeated Roentgen’s experiments to test 
the accuracy of his statements, and to see if further 
significant facts might be discovered in this new realm. 
This is the method of cooperative fellowship in the pursuit 
of the truth. At the same time, if this wide-spread repe¬ 
tition of the experiments of Roentgen were to be anything 
more than mere mechanical repetition, it was necessary 
that the experiments should be performed as critically 
as by Roentgen himself in his original discovery. Each 
8 Faith and Morals, p. 129. 


13 


The Scientific Approach 

investigator must be able honestly to testify out of his 
own experience to the confirmation of Roentgen’s results. 
This is the method of independence. The very fact that 
an idealist’s definition of the ideal can be thus taken as 
expressing at the same time the essence of the scientific 
spirit and method, suggests at least the possibility of 
much closer and more harmonious relations between mod¬ 
ern science and the ideal interests than men have com¬ 
monly supposed. 

Moreover, modern science is perhaps the sphere of 
man’s completest success in mastering those great ideal 
tasks which the mind sets itself—the tasks of thinking the 
world through into unity in various kinds of terms. 
Modern science has succeeded in solving in unusual degree 
one of these tasks—that of thinking the world through 
into unity in mathematico-mechanical terms. And the 
very fact that men have succeeded at this one point gives 
hope, as James suggests , 4 of increasing success in those 
other parallel tasks which the mind sets itself, of thinking 
the world through into unity, for example, in esthetic and 
ethical and religious terms. 

In all this interworking of the scientific and the ideal, 
what now has modern science definitely to contribute to 
the ideal interests? 

First of all, it is to be seen that modern science has 
enormously increased the resources available for the ideal 
interests ,—resources of knowledge, of power, and of 
wealth. It is literally true to say, in the light of the tri¬ 
umphs of modern science, that one can set no limit to 
achievements that may still be made in all these three 
realms,—in knowledge, in power, in wealth. Because of 
what modern science has here done, possibilities are now 
reasonably within reach which were hardly dreamed of 
4 Psychology, Vol. II, p. 671. 



14 


Seeing Life Whole 

earlier. In spite of defective distribution, men can look 
forward with hope to the abolition of paralyzing ignor¬ 
ance, of hopeless drudgery, and of inevitable deficit,— 
to a time when a man’s life shall be possible for every man. 
But great as the resources are which modern science can 
make available, we need to remember that what modern 
science here offers is simply possibilities, not basic as¬ 
surance. Whether these possibilities are to become actual 
realities depends on the honest cooperative work of many 
groups of men. 

In these possibilities, then, modern science brings a 
great challenge to the ideal interests , and particularly to 
education. It confronts our age with questions like these: 
Can you rise to these possibilities? Are you training men 
worthy of these stupendous powers and trusts, or have 
these come too soon? Is discipline keeping pace with 
democracy? In all this an especial challenge is brought 
to education and to all the moral and religious forces. 
For an age preeminent in power and wealth must be also 
preeminent in self-control or world disaster impends. And 
this means in turn that it belongs to the ideal forces to 
make sure that men are filled with interests and enthusi¬ 
asms great enough and ideal enough to dominate all the 
resources of knowledge and power and wealth which 
science makes available. Men caught glimpses, at any 
rate in the Great War, of the tremendous possibilities of 
cooperation even in great international projects, and we 
cannot remain satisfied to have scrapped all such in¬ 
spiring cooperation. We must not finally fail to carry 
over into the tasks of peace some, at least, of the great 
cooperative constructive agencies which the war forced 
upon us. 

Moreover, it is not less important to see that modern 
science has given to the ideal interests the vision of a far 


The Scientific Approach 15 

larger and more significant world , 5 —a world infinitely 
enlarged, scientifically unified, constantly evolving, imma- 
nently law-abiding,—a world that constitutes an organic 
whole. In every one of these w^ays, the world has become 
a new and glorified world. It is impossible to overstate 
the greatness of the opportunity which modern science, in 
this vision of a new world, has given to men inspired with 
the ideal spirit. So far is this new world—enlarged, uni¬ 
fied, evolving, law-abiding, organic—from belittling man, 
it rather reflects its glory back upon man at every point. 
For the vision is one of his own creation and every new 
discernment is at the same time a disclosure of possible 
power. The vision of such a world means not less than 
this,—the possibility for all men of entering intelligently 
and unselfishly into the world-life and into the all-em¬ 
bracing plans of God. It was this ideal contribution of 
modern science of which Eucken was thinking, when he 
wrote of science: “Its effect is not exhausted in the abun¬ 
dance of particular achievements; by the objectivity of 
its work it has brought the world much nearer to us, has 
led our life to greater clearness, has made us more alert, 
and given us a secure dominion over things. Science, 
therefore, must also be a factor in the determination of a 
philosophy of life, and must raise the whole position of 
man.” 6 

Once more, then, in the light of all its conquests over 
external nature, modern science points the ideal in¬ 
terests to the one great method of scientific mastery over 
the forces of nature , now conceived in their widest scope; 
and so gives hope of constantly enlarging achievements in 
all the realms of man’s experience and endeavor. 

The significance of the gift of modern science at this 

• Cf. King, Religion as Life, pp. 178-184. 

a Life’s Basis and Life’s Ideal, p. 345. 


16 


Seeing Life Whole 

point may be seen in the contrast between the oriental 
and the occidental sense of law. For the Oriental, law 
means only an all-embracing fate, tending to paralyze all 
effort; for the Occidental, it means discernment of the 
laws of the universe, and so a key to the mastery of its 
forces. For men must bring to the complex problems of 
individual and social development and progress the same 
method of scientific mastery which has so splendidly 
served them in the conquest of the forces of external na¬ 
ture—so far as it can be here applied. This is the 
significance of the “social survey” in our attempt to mas¬ 
ter sociological problems. It is the interpenetration of 
the scientific spirit and method with the social con¬ 
sciousness. The social consciousness sets the goal; the 
scientific spirit and method indicate the indubitable way 
to the goal. We study the field. We discover the laws 
which are there at work. We fulfill the conditions in¬ 
volved in those laws, and so master the situation. 

It is not strange that men like Wells, and Robinson, 7 
and Dewey, 8 have so felt the spell and the urge of what 
might be accomplished in the betterment of human so¬ 
ciety by a thoroughgoing application of scientific prin¬ 
ciples, so victorious in the realm of external nature. 
Wells’ characterization of scientific men, which Robinson 
quotes, 9 naturally suggests high possibilities of human 
progress: “In their field they think and work with an 
intensity, an integrity, a breadth, boldness, patience, thor¬ 
oughness, and faithfulness—excepting only a few artists 
—which puts their work out of all comparison with any 
other human activity.” 

Professor H. S. Nash, as long ago as 1899, caught this 

7 The Mind in the Making, pp. 12-14, 48 ff. 

8 Reconstruction in Philosophy, pp. 72-74, 115, 130, 211. 

0 Op. cit., p. 7. 





The Scientific Approach 17 

vision and its ideal significance, and wrote prophetically: 
“The supreme problem beginning to press upon the mind 
and heart of our own generation, and sure to press with 
even greater insistence and inspiration upon the mind and 
heart of the generations following us, is the creation of a 
higher type of terrestrial society .” 

“The scientific reason, being enamoured of the visible uni¬ 
verse, must enter society with entire conviction and a resolute 
purpose. By all it holds dear, the conclusion that terrestrial 
society is capable of indefinite betterment is brought home.” 
“Our typical modern, if he follows his thoughts down into a 
controlling and coordinating conception, finds himself driven, 
by all the energy and prestige of the visible universe, to make 
human history the centre of significance, interest, and worth. 
Deepening self-knowledge and strengthening self-masterhood 
are not to be attained except in communion with society in 
its full breadth and scope.” “My ethics must give me a con¬ 
ception of duty that shall go to the bottom of the visible 
universe, and at the same time shall make me intimate with 
the common life of the great bulk of mankind.” “Ethics, fol¬ 
lowed along this interior line, leads without fail into religion. 
To keep the will steady and its temper true, to keep one’s 
footing in the very thick of a society whose heavy mortgage 
of brutehood and incapacity we are forced by the broad and 
careful knowledge of our day to take clear cognizance of, is 
a task that cannot be discharged in full, except by the aid 
of religion.” 10 

A modern editor, Mr. Herbert Croly of The New Re¬ 
public, puts most compactly a similar vision of the possi¬ 
bility of “the creation of a higher type of terrestrial 
society,” as the pressing problem for the Christian 
church: 

“For the first time in human history science is endowing a 
religion of human brotherhood with the material out of which 

10 Ethics and Revelation, pp. 154, 187-8, 48, 50. 


18 


Seeing Life Whole 

it may be possible to fashion an art and discipline of humane 
living.” “Up to date neither the priests nor the philosophers 
have realized how much the reenforcement of religious truth 
by science may mean for human fulfillment. Modern science 
is using its new knowledge only to increase the control of 
man over nature and of some men over other men. But some 
day it will dawn on Christian ministers and on lay evangelists 
that the new knowledge, just in so far as it penetrates the 
secrets of human nature, can also be used to increase the con¬ 
trol of man over society and over his behavior, being and 
destiny. The larger the knowledge of human nature, the 
more trustworthy the art and discipline of life which ethical 
investigators and inventors can place at the disposal of a 
religious community for the better realization of its conviction 
of the sacredness and regeneracy of human personality. It 
will be the business of religious leaders to teach men how 
really to lead a good life, which is something they now lack 
the knowledge and the disposition to do.” 10a 

Other illustrations of this method of scientific mastery 
may be found in McGiffert’s The Rise of Modern Religious 
Ideas , and Ellwood’s Reconstruction of Religion , with 
their rich suggestiveness of lines of intellectual and social 
and religious progress. Though they are also quite har¬ 
monious with Robinson’s emphasis on “creative thinking,” 
in sloughing off false and hindering views, in strenuously 
cultivating the scientific spirit, and in extending the ap¬ 
plication of the scientific method to the problems of 
human progress wherever possible. 

But modern science has a further significant contri¬ 
bution to make to the ideal interests in the gift of the 
scientific spirit itself. That spirit reflects the open- 
minded humility of the rigorous self-limitation of modern 
science and, as we have seen, becomes at its best a habitual 
determination to see straight, to report exactly, to give 
an absolutely honest reaction on the situation. This 
10a The New Republic, Feb. 22, 1922, p. 370. 


19 


The Scientific Approach 

means that the scientific spirit embodies a passion for 
reality and seeks radical intellectual integrity. It is 
thus a great moral quality coming with the prestige of 
the enormous achievements of modern science. Now it 
would be difficult indeed to find a closer parallel for the 
scientific spirit than the demand of Jesus for utter inner 
integrity of spirit: “Why even of yourselves,” he says, 
“judge ye not what is right?” His constant direct ap¬ 
peal to the reason and conscience of his hearer, rather 
than to any external authority, even his own, reflects a 
similar radical loyalty to the truth. For he seeks for his 
disciples insights, convictions, faiths, and decisions which 
are veritably their own, and not passively taken over from 
any other. A close and effective alliance between the 
scientific and the ideal interests ought then to be possible. 

When we have thus seen something of the great posi¬ 
tive contributions which modern science is making and can 
make to the ideal interests, we perceive how impossible it 
is to regard their relations as essentially antagonistic; 
how many difficulties, on the contrary, disappear when we 
thus see our world problem in the large; how much more 
unified our world-view becomes; and how real is the light 
thrown by modern science upon our specifically ideal views. 

IV 

So many religious people, however, are feeling just now 
serious difficulty in harmonizing their religious faith with 
the scientific view of evolution , that a brief review of that 
problem seems demanded. 

The difficulties felt are generally of two quite different 
kinds: the difficulty of harmonizing the evolution theory 
with Biblical statements, and the difficulty of harmonizing 
the scientific presentation of evolution with common re- 


20 


Seeing Life Whole 

ligious views of God and man. In the interests of clear¬ 
ness and accuracy, it is desirable distinctly to separate 
the two questions; for quite different principles are in¬ 
volved. The consideration of the first difficulty naturally 
belongs to the discussion of the Biblical approach to our 
entire problem of a Christian philosophy of life, and will 
be dealt with there. The second difficulty should be defi¬ 
nitely faced at this point. 11 

It is natural that many should have found great diffi¬ 
culty in making the transition from a traditional doctrine 
of direct divine creation, especially of man, to a view of 
the gradual development of all the world including plants, 
animals and men, with no sign of direct intervention by 
God at any point. Such a presentation seemed to lend 
itself readily to a denial of all divine purpose in the world 
and of the special significance of man, and to a material¬ 
istic interpretation of the universe. It seemed even to 
such fine minds as those of Romanes and Huxley, for 
example, that Darwin’s setting forth of evolution meant 
simply a selfish bloody struggle for existence and drove 
one, therefore, to the abandonment of any ideal inter¬ 
pretation of the world. For Romanes it seemed that the 
universe had “lost its soul of loveliness”; for faith in 
God had gone. And Huxley felt that any true human 
ethics must be at perpetual war with the ethics of the 
universe, as the evolution theory disclosed them. When 
Darwin added to his Origin of Species his book on The 
Descent of Man , it seemed to many still more impossible 
to harmonize the evolution view with any faith in God 
as Father, or in man, as a child of God and made in his 
image. 

Natural, then, the difficulties were. Were they also final 
and decisive? Or was this to be another case where the 

v 

11 Cf. King, Tie construction in Theology, pp. 48-60, 81-108. 


21 


The Scientific Approach 

difficulty was not with the majestic array of the facts, but 
with a superficial interpretation of the facts? 

A series of considerations suggests that religion need 
have no quarrel with the scientific view of evolution . 

In the first place, we may well remind ourselves again 
of science's threefold self-restriction to phenomena, to 
experience, and to the tracing of causal connections. For 
this means that it is consciously not passing upon any 
ultimate questions of origin or reality. These questions 
belong to philosophy. Science as such, thus, can be no 
enemy of religion; while a materialistic philosophy is in¬ 
evitably such an enemy. It is a pity that those anxious 
about religion should not see this fact. 

In the second place, as we have seen, the two questions 
of process and meaning cannot well cross each other. In 
its setting forth of evolution, science is simply dealing 
with the process . What that process means , what ideal 
interpretation it will bear, religion and the other ideal 
interests may themselves decide. And it is just as pos¬ 
sible (and much more reasonable) to put a religious in¬ 
terpretation upon the facts of the evolutionary process, 
as it is to put a materialistic or purely mechanical inter¬ 
pretation upon that process. This possible ideal inter¬ 
pretation of evolution has become much clearer, as study 
of the evolutionary process has gone on, and as men have 
come to see that that process has not been primarily a 
selfish bloody struggle for existence even in the lower 
animal series. From the beginning, as Drummond in¬ 
sisted, side by side with “the struggle for life” has gone 
on “the struggle for the life of others.” The evolutionary 
process becomes thus capable of an ideal, a religious, in¬ 
terpretation. So much so that Thomson and Geddes con¬ 
clude their study of evolution with an emphatic idealism: 12 

™ Evolution, pp. 246-248. 


22 


Seeing Life Whole 

“As in plants the species-maintaining functions preponder¬ 
ate over the individual ones ... so the same preponderance 
appears in animals. The ‘self-interest’ in which the utili¬ 
tarian economists found the all-sufficient spring of action, 
and which naturalists too long and too uncritically adopted 
from these (whence Huxley’s ‘gladiator’s show’), turns out 
to be enlightened by family interest, species interest, however 
sub-conscious. . . . That increase of the reproductive sacrifice 
which first makes the mammal, and then marks each of its 
distinctive uplifts of further progress, . . . that increase of 
parental care, that frequent appearance of sociality and co¬ 
operation which, even in its rudest forms, so surely secures 
the success of the species attaining it, be it mammal or bird, 
insect or even worm—all these survivals of the truly fittest, 
through love and sacrifice, sociability and co-operation simple 
to complex—need far other prominence than they can pos¬ 
sibly receive even by some mildewing attenuation of the 
classic economic hypothesis of the progress of the species 
essentially through the internecine struggle among its in¬ 
dividuals at the margin of subsistence. . . . Most briefly 
stated, the view of evolution thus reached is that . . . with 
progress essentially through the subordination of individual 
struggle and development to species-maintaining ends. The 
ideal of evolution is thus no gladiator’s show, but an Eden; 
and though competition can never be wholly eliminated . . . 
it is much for our pure natural history to see no longer 
struggle, but love as ‘creation’s final law.’ ” 

Moreover, it should be noted, just because the scien¬ 
tific question is one of process solely, and because no one 
thinks of seeing God at work in the changes of nature like 
a finite creature working upon things from without, that 
the process would look just the same to the observer, 
whether he thought it purely mechanical or wholly due to 
God. 

It is also true, if simply the questions of process are 
left to science, that religion has no reason to object to the 
fullest freedom of investigation in any field. In any in- 


The Scientific Approach 23 

quiry concerning the facts, religion refuses to settle a 
priori how God must have acted in any given case in na¬ 
ture or revelation, but turns over to humble patient scien¬ 
tific inquiry how he did and does act. As I have else¬ 
where said: Nor ought this absolutely untrammeled scien¬ 
tific investigation to give anxiety to any real believer in 
God. For scientific investigation simply seeks the facts, 
and can, therefore, so far as it is successful, only make 
more clear to us exactly how God did proceed. And this, 
if we are really in earnest in our desire to understand God, 
we ought to be glad to know. If to-morrow men were able 
to trace in the laboratory the precise steps by which the 
living arises from the non-living, no ideal or religious in¬ 
terest would be in any manner affected, except that we 
should simply understand a little more fully the method 
God took in a case in which the mode of his action is to us 
now quite obscure. We are continually in danger of as¬ 
suming that vital religious interests are at stake in the 
decision of questions of mere process; whereas religion is 
primarily concerned only with meaning. 13 

In the whole question of scientific evolution, therefore, 
just because it is simply a question of process, the re¬ 
ligious man should see that it becomes, from the religious 
point of view, only a question of the method of creation 
which God actually employed—gradual or sudden; by a 
succession of separate divine acts, or by applying in the 
universe as a whole such a process as is indubitably seen 
in the development of the oak from the acorn, or in the 
growth of an individual human being from the germ. 
The religious man is not primarily concerned about the 
method of creation at all. He sees God as the creative 
source of all in any case, and he is sure with Fotze that 
“whichever way of creation God may have chosen, in none 

13 Reconstruction in Theology, pp. 49-50. 


26 


Seeing Life Whole 

gressive elimination of God from the universe. Religion 
has no interest in insisting upon “gaps” in the evolution 
series—the occurrence of chasms that must be bridged 
by direct divine intervention; as though God were pecu¬ 
liarly needed at such points in world development and 
not in the rest. It is, therefore, quite unwilling to base its 
faith in God upon such gaps in the evolution series, or to 
base its argument for God on ignorance. It believes in 
God, upon whom the whole universe, in every least atom 
of it, and in every humblest spirit of it, is absolutely 
dependent. Of that dependence it is certain, and no study 
of the method of it can make it less certain. 

Moreover, our study of the contributions of modern 
science to the ideal interests suggests that we need not 
stop in a mere defense of the evolution point of view, but 
may expect from evolution positive gains for religion . 
For the evolution point of view gives a larger view of the 
method, plan and aim of God in the universe; brings a 
great extension and strengthening) of the old design 
argument by replacing a multitude of smaller designs 
testifying to intelligence by one all-embracing purpose; 
reveals more clearly the harmony between the plan of 
God in the natural world and his plan in the spiritual 
world; and tends to an enlarged conception of God in his 
immanence in the world. 

Evolution, thus, is not merely consonant with a theistic 
view of the world; it distinctly strengthens such a view. 
As Waggett puts it, it brought to theism “a juster 
method,” “a more scientific temper,” and “a bolder lan¬ 
guage,” and so made our theism more “sufficiently theis¬ 
tic.” “For science, the Divine must be constant, operative 
everywhere and in every quality and power, in environ¬ 
ment and in organism, in stimulus and in reaction, in 
variation and in struggle, in hereditary equilibrium, and 


27 


The Scientific Approach 

in ‘the unstable state of species’ ; equally present on both 
sides of every strain, in all pressures and in all resistances, 
in short in the general wonder of life and the world. And 
this is exactly what the Divine Power must be for religious 
faith. . . . Here again our theism was not sufficiently 
theistic.” 17 

Evolution, moreover, as the study of it has gone on, 
has made it increasingly evident that we have greater 
reason than ever to believe in intelligent purpose at work 
in the world. To this effect Ellwood 18 quotes Conklin as 
a scientific scholar: “The possibilities are almost infinity 
to one against the conclusion that the order of nature, 
the fitness of environment, and the course of progres¬ 
sive evolution with all its marvellous adaptations are 
all the results of blind chance. ... In short, science 
reveals to us a universe of ends as well as of means, 
of teleology as well as of mechanism, and in this it agrees 
with the teachings of philosophy and religion.” 19 To like 
import Professor J. Arthur Thomson, out of his full 
knowledge as a biologist, thus closes his Gifford Lectures 
on A Study of Animate Nature: 20 “The general conclu¬ 
sion of our study is that a scientific description of Animate 
Nature and its Evolution is congruent with the view that 
the whole is the expression of an originative purpose. The 
scientific formulation is consistent with the conclusion, 
which must be reached along other lines, that the ‘Nature’ 
we know intimately may be interpreted as one of the 
expressions of the Divine Spirit. No conclusion along our 
lines of study is likely to be within sight of the truth that 
does not sound the note of joyous admiration: ‘Prais’d 
be the fathomless Universe, for life and joy, and for 

11 Evolution in Modern Thought, pp. 226-232, 243. 

18 The Reconstruction of Religion, p. 134. 

19 The Direction of Human Evolution, p. 228. 

30 Quoted by Davidson in Recent Theistic Discussion, pp. 55, 56, 


26 


Seeing Life Whole 

gressive elimination of God from the universe. Religion 
has no interest in insisting upon “gaps” in the evolution 
series—the occurrence of chasms that must be bridged 
by direct divine intervention; as though God were pecu¬ 
liarly needed at such points in world development and 
not in the rest. It is, therefore, quite unwilling to base its 
faith in God upon such gaps in the evolution series, or to 
base its argument for God on ignorance. It believes in 
God, upon whom the whole universe, in every least atom 
of it, and in every humblest spirit of it, is absolutely 
dependent. Of that dependence it is certain, and no study 
of the method of it can make it less certain. 

Moreover, our study of the contributions of modern 
science to the ideal interests suggests that we need not 
stop in a mere defense of the evolution point of view, but 
may expect from evolution positive gains for religion . 
For the evolution point of view gives a larger view of the 
method, plan and aim of God in the universe; brings a 
great extension and strengthening of the old design 
argument by replacing a multitude of smaller designs 
testifying to intelligence by one all-embracing purpose; 
reveals more clearly the harmony between the plan of 
God in the natural world and his plan in the spiritual 
world; and tends to an enlarged conception of God in his 
immanence in the world. 

Evolution, thus, is not merely consonant with a theistic 
view of the world; it distinctly strengthens such a view. 
As Waggett puts it, it brought to theism “a juster 
method,” “a more scientific temper,” and “a bolder lan¬ 
guage,” and so made our theism more “sufficiently theis¬ 
tic.” “For science, the Divine must be constant, operative 
everywhere and in every quality and power, in environ¬ 
ment and in organism, in stimulus and in reaction, in 
variation and in struggle, in hereditary equilibrium, and 


27 


The Scientific Approach 

in ‘the unstable state of species’ ; equally present on both 
sides of every strain, in all pressures and in all resistances, 
in short in the general wonder of life and the world. And 
this is exactly what the Divine Power must be for religious 
faith. . . . Plere again our theism was not sufficiently 
theistic.” 17 

Evolution, moreover, as the study of it has gone on, 
has made it increasingly evident that we have greater 
reason than ever to believe in intelligent purpose at work 
in the world. To this effect Ellwood 18 quotes Conklin as 
a scientific scholar: “The possibilities are almost infinity 
to one against the conclusion that the order of nature, 
the fitness of environment, and the course of progres¬ 
sive evolution with all its marvellous adaptations are 
all the results of blind chance. ... In short, science 
reveals to us a universe of ends as well as of means, 
of teleology as well as of mechanism, and in this it agrees 
with the teachings of philosophy and religion.” 19 To like 
import Professor J. Arthur Thomson, out of his full 
knowledge as a biologist, thus closes his Gifford Lectures 
on A Study of Animate Nature: 20 “The general conclu¬ 
sion of our study is that a scientific description of Animate 
Nature and its Evolution is congruent with the view that 
the whole is the expression of an originative purpose. The 
scientific formulation is consistent with the conclusion, 
which must be reached along other lines, that the ‘Nature’ 
we know intimately may be interpreted as one of the 
expressions of the Divine Spirit. No conclusion along our 
lines of study is likely to be within sight of the truth that 
does not sound the note of joyous admiration: ‘Prais’d 
be the fathomless Universe, for life and joy, and for 

11 Evolution in Modern Thought, pp. 226-232, 243. 

18 The Reconstruction of Religion, p. 134. 

19 The Direction of Human Evolution, p. 228. 

30 Quoted by Davidson in Recent Theistic Discussion, pp. 55, 56. 


28 


Seeing Life Whole 

objects and knowledge curious.’ But shall we not rather 
seek to worship the Author of the Universe—albeit so 
imperfectly discerned—from whom all comes, by whom all 
lives, in whom all ends ?” 

And the poet agrees with the biologist: 

A fire-mist and a planet 
A crystal and a cell 
A jelly-fish and a saurian 

And caves where cave-men dwell; 

Then a sense of law and beauty, 

And a face turned from the clod— 

Some call it evolution 

And others call it God. 21 

21 W. H. Car ruth, Each in His Own Tongue. 




CHAPTER II 


THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH 

In modern psychology, in the broader sense, men are 
trying to apply the scientific spirit and method to the 
study of man’s own nature in all its manifestations and 
relations. Just as in the study of external nature men 
have sought to discover the laws of that nature and so to 
master its forces and resources; so in ps} :r chology they 
are seeking to discern the laws of mans oxen nature , and 
so to master its forces and resources. That concerns all 
human endeavor. We naturally turn next, therefore, in 
our problem of a Christian philosophy of life, to the 
psychological approach. 


i 

The significant breadth of the more modern psychology, 
including a reasonable emphasis on “behavior,” is clearly 
indicated by McDougall and can hardly be put more 
briefly: 

“Psychologists must cease to be content with the sterile 
and narrow conception of their science as the science of con¬ 
sciousness, and must boldly assert its claim to be the positive 
science of the mind in all its aspects and modes of functioning, 
or, as I would prefer to say, the positive science of conduct 
or behaviour. Psychology must not regard the introspective 
description of the stream of consciousness as its whole task, 
but only as a preliminary part of its work. Such intro¬ 
spective description, such ‘pure psychology/ can never con- 

29 


30 


Seeing Life Whole 

stitute a science, or at least can never rise to the level of an 
explanatory science; and it can never in itself be of any 
great value to the social sciences. The basis required by all 
of them is a comparative and physiological psychology relying 
largely on objective methods, the observation of the behaviour 
of men and of animals of all varieties under all possible con¬ 
ditions of health and disease. It must take the largest possible 
view of its scope and functions, and must be an evolutionary 
natural history of mind. Above all, it must aim at providing 
a full and accurate account of those most fundamental ele¬ 
ments of our constitution, the innate tendencies to thought and 
action that constitute the native basis of the mind. Happily 
this more generous conception of psychology is beginning to 
prevail. . . . On every hand we hear it said that the static, 
descriptive, purely analytic psychology must give place to a 
dynamic, functional, voluntaristic view of mind. A second 
very important advance of psychology towards usefulness is 
due to the increasing recognition of the extent to which the 
adult human mind is the product of the moulding influence 
exerted by the social environment, and of the fact that the 
strictly individual human mind, with which alone the older 
introspective and descriptive psychology concerned itself, is an 
abstraction merely and has no real existence.” 1 

ii 

Now from the point of view of the ideal interests, I 
think, we need have no quarrel with such a definition of 
;psychology as this, or with such an attempt as it pre¬ 
supposes. On the one hand, justice is done to the 
evolutionary, behavioristic, and social aspects of psychol¬ 
ogy, and, on the other hand, there is no attempt to identify 
consciousness with behavior. The change in viewpoint 
and scope involved does not necessarily carry with it any 
hostility to ideal interests. Indeed, McDougall, whose 
definition I am using, has no thought of denying the facts 
of consciousness, and himself insists at vital points on a 

1 Social Psychology, 11th ed., pp. 15-16, 


31 


The Psychological Approach 

teleological interpretation of the psychological facts. 2 
It was inevitable that such an attempt as McDougall 
defines should be made, in trying to show the dawn and 
growth of mind in a study of the evolution of the animal 
world and of men. In truth, “behavioristic” psychology, 
as thus defined, might be said to be simply an attempt to 
carry to the farthest possible limit the conception of 
psychology as an empirical science, confining its questions 
absolutely to questions of process and not of final mean¬ 
ing. This is an entirely legitimate attempt, if it is only 
recognized as being just what it is and not something 
else. 

It is even desirable to carry this point of view of 
empirical science —the solution of the question of process 
—as far as it can be carried. No limitations are to be 
set upon the inquiry after empirical explanation. This 
means, for example, that as far as possible we shall 
express the facts of physics in mathematical form, though 
we cannot make such propositions cover the entire con¬ 
crete reality. It means that we must carry the physical 
and chemical explanations to their utmost possible limit 
in the study of life in biology. It means that we must go 
as far as we possibly can in tracing causal connections in 
the stream of consciousness and in all physical reactions— 
in all behavior. As Miinsterberg 3 puts it: “Psychology 
may dissolve our will and our personality and our free¬ 
dom, and it is constrained by duty to do so, but it must 
not forget that it speaks only of that will and that per¬ 
sonality which are by metamorphosis substituted for the 
personality and the will of real life, and that it is this real 
personality and its free will which creates psychology in 
the service of its ends and aims and ideals.” Every 

2 Social Psychology, p. 263. 

* Psychology and Life, pp. 23-28. 


32 Seeing Life Whole 

science is in this sense a “child of duties,” as Miinsterberg 
ca]Js it. 

The scientific historian in like manner must try to 
carry his proof of causal relations as far as he possibly 
can; though he may well conclude in the end, with Har- 
nack, that biography is both the least scientific, and at 
the same time the most valuable, history. Inquiry, thus, 
after an empirical explanation is entirely justified. It 
will give a part of the facts; and it will even throw more 
light probably in the end on the question of meaning, if 
the world is a unity at all. 


hi 

But it needs squarely to be said that there is a type of 
“ behaviorism ” that tends directly to a materialistic 
philosophy and that therefore cannot be harmonized with 
an ideal or religious interpretation of the world. Pro¬ 
fessor Pratt has put this issue so sharply and effectively 
that I may well leave it with his full statement: 4 

“Behaviorism originated as a method in animal psychology. 
Out of patience with the futile attempt to tell what the animal 
was thinking about or how it was feeling when put through 
various experiments, the investigators in this field at length 
said, Why bother our heads as to this unanswerable question? 
The important thing for science is to know how the animal 
reacts in the presence of various stimuli. Let us, therefore, 
frankly make the object of our study not the animal’s hypo¬ 
thetical consciousness but its actual behavior. So successful 
was this reorganization of method in getting results that were 
truly objective, verifiable, and scientific, that certain of the 
bolder spirits proposed it should be applied also to human 
psychology; and applied it has been. The experimenter ob¬ 
serves the reactions, the behavior, the physiological processes 

4 Matter and Spirit, pp. 112-13, 115, 116-17, 118. 


The Psychological Approach 33 

of his subject, makes objective measurements with instru¬ 
ments of precision, and never asks for his subject’s intro¬ 
spection nor bothers as to his consciousness. The objectivity 
of these observations is one of the advantages claimed for 
the new method by its adherents, but they also enthusiastically 
recommend it as a welcome means of escaping the age-long 
psychophysical problem and of putting permanently on the 
shelf all its traditional solutions. . . . 

“The word Behaviorism is used in two quite distinct senses. 
It may, on the one hand, be taken as a method in psychology— 
the method, namely, which refuses to make any use of intro¬ 
spection or any reference to consciousness, and which insists 
that as psychologists we should study only bodily reactions 
and physiological processes. But secondly it may be taken 
in more metaphysical fashion; it may, namely, mean that 
consciousness is behavior, and that in any other sense it simply 
does not exist. . . . 

“Let us, then, consider Behaviorism in the first place as 
merely a method of psychology. . . . We may have our own 
opinions as to the possibility of giving a complete or even a 
very intelligent description of human nature by a method that 
leaves consciousness (in the ordinary sense of the word) 
entirely out of account; but so long as the behaviorist sticks 
to his measurements and makes no statements either explicit 
or implicit concerning consciousness we shall have nothing to 
say, because his assertions so far forth have no bearing upon 
the mind-body problem. But as a fact, the behaviorist means 
his method to have a very definite bearing upon the mind- 
body problem; it is, as we have often been told, a means 
of avoiding it altogether. Now so long as Behaviorism re¬ 
mains merely a method it is plain that there is only one way 
in which it can enable us to avoid this question of the relation 
of the psychical to the physical. This is, namely, by insisting 
that the psychical has no relation to the physical that is of 
any importance to science. In fact, this is exactly the pre¬ 
supposition of Behaviorism as a method. Human behavior, it 
maintains, can be adequately and completely described and 
explained by the anatomy and physiology of the body and 
by the nature of the various physical stimuli that play upon 
it. No reference to consciousness is either needed or in any 
way helpful. . . . 


34 


Seeing Life Whole 

“On the question of the efficiency of consciousness, there¬ 
fore, Behaviorism, even when understood only as a method, is 
obliged to take exactly the same position as Materialism. 
But Behaviorism cannot take the position of Materialism and 
avoid its difficulties.” 

But even when a metaphysical behaviorism is entirely 
avoided, and psychology is kept a truly empirical science, 
it needs constantly to be remembered that the point of 
view of empirical science, as we have seen, is only one point 
of view. Side by side with the question of empirical 
explanation there must be the question of meaning, the 
question of ideal interpretation. And—to put the matter 
with the utmost brevity—the whole of reality, the whole 
man, registers its inevitable protest against making the 
mathematico-mechanical view of the world the only view; 
against making logical consistency the sole test of truth 
or reality; against ignoring all data except those which 
come through the intellect alone; that is, against trying 
to make a part, not the whole of man, the standard; in 
other words, against ignoring the data which come 
through feeling and will—emotional, esthetic, ethical, and 
religious data—as well as those judgments of worth which 
underlie reason’s theoretical determinations . 6 

This is only to say, in the light of the discussion of 
evolution, that behavioristic psychology brings to the 
ideal interests no new difficulties. It is still true that 
origin does not determine value; that it is of the essence 
of evolution that the new appears with its new stages and 
new laws; that the prime significance of the psychical, 
side by side with the physical, cannot be denied; that the 
psychological cannot be forthwith translated into the 
philosophical—answers to questions of process into 
answers to questions of meaning; that especially, as Lipp- 
8 Cf. King, Theology and the Social Consciousness , pp. 78-81. 




The Psychological Approach 35 

mann G protests, so deterministic a view of human conduct 
through “interests” is not to be taken as to scout all 
rational guidance of human progress by first-rate states¬ 
men, not “second-best statesmen”; that on the contrary, 
as we have already seen, clear gains for ideal interests are 
to be expected through the growing mastery of the laws 
of human nature and of social progress. 

IV 

We may, indeed, go farther, and say that when scien¬ 
tifically guarded against a materialistic behaviorism, the 
broader conception of the more modern psychology, with 
its evolution point of view and with its emphasis on the 
functional and on the social, makes only more important 
the great practical inferences from modern psychology. 
So Professor George M. Stratton answers the question— 
Where has psychology left religion? 7 “In brief it would 
seem to me proper to say that psychology leaves religion 
living, with new means for its great work, and with fresh 
confidence in the naturalness and the need of the religious 
life.” For at no point does scientific study approach 
more nearly the problem of moral and religious living than 
in these great practical inferences from psychology. For 
from the religious point of view I cannot more adequately 
define the goal of my life than to say that it is to fulfil the 
complete purpose with which God called me into being; 
for the essence of anything is best expressed in terms of 
purpose. To state the essence of a machine, for example, 
cannot be done by mechanical enumeration and descrip¬ 
tion of its parts, but only by indicating what it is for, 
what it was meant to be. So, if I could know the full 

9 Yale Review, July, 1922, pp. 673 If. 

T The Journal of Religion, January, 1923. 



36 


Seeing Life Whole 

purpose of God in calling me into being—the will of God 
for me—I should thus know the goal of my life. 

Now, from the fundamentally Christian point of view 
the will of God is chiefly revealed in two ways: first, in the 
laws of man’s nature, which religion must conceive as the 
creation of God, and so as manifesting something at least 
of the will of God concerning man; and, second, in the life 
and teaching of Christ, whom Christianity conceives as the 
supreme revelation of God. 

This means, in the first place, that men are to discern 
and obey the laws involved in their own nature —the laws 
of life individual and social. Huxley’s famous definition 
of education takes exactly this point of view: “Education 
is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature— 
under which name I include not merely things and their 
forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the 
affections and will into an earnest and loving desire to 
move in harmony with those laws.” The point of view is 
as simple and basic as is the common-sense method of 
dealing with a line automobile. As surely as one will get 
the most out of such a machine by following carefully the 
directions of the manufacturer, so surely will he get the 
most out of his own being, by knowing and obeying its 
laws. 

Similarly, in the second place, if the Christian point of 
view is right in finding the supreme revelation of the will 
of God in history’s supreme personality, then men are also 
to build on the revelation of the zvill of God in the life and 
teaching of Jesus. 

And if the will of God—the moral and religious goal of 
life—is to be found in these two ways, the two ways ought 
fundamentally to agree —the great practical inferences 
from modern psychology, and the Christian ideals. But 
the suggestiveness and helpfulness of such agreement 



The Psychological Approach 37 

depend upon an absolutely honest use of each line of 
thought. We begin with the inferences from psychology. 

y 

The moral and religious significance of the great prac¬ 
tical inferences from modern psychology may be briefly 
indicated here. 8 

In my Rational Living 9 I have pointed out that there 
seem to me to be four great inferences from modern 
psychology , and each with suggestions for life and char¬ 
acter—that is, with direct suggestion of the conditions of 
grow r th, of character, of happiness, and of influence. And 
these inferences seem to me to be only further emphasized 
by later psychological developments. These four great 
inferences are: life is complex; man is a unity; will and 
action are of central importance; and the real is concrete. 
In other words, modern psychology has four great empha¬ 
ses ; for it may be said to urge upon us the recognition of 
the multiplicity and intricacy of the relations everywhere 
confronting us; of the essential unity of the relations 
involved in our own nature, the unity of the mind and the 
unity of mind and body; of the fact that this unity 
demands action and is best expressed in action; and that 
we are, thus, everywhere shut out from resting in abstrac¬ 
tions and must find reality only in the concrete. 

Manifestly these contentions are all closely interwoven , 
and they may even be regarded as all summed up in the 
last—as asserting the interrelatedness of all. For if only 

8 For a full statement of these inferences see King, Rational 
Living. For a brief, direct putting of psychological help in the 
problem of character, see King, “How to Make a Rational Fight 
for Character,” in Personal and Ideal Elements in Education, pp. 
236-272. 

•Pp. 3-4. 


38 


Seeing Life Whole 

the concrete is real, then life is, in the first place, no 
abstraction or series of abstractions, but rich and complex 
beyond all formulation. In this complexity, secondly, no 
sharp lines can be drawn, all is interwoven; the life of 
man, therefore, is a unity—body and mind. But all 
experiences, bodily and mental, tend to terminate in 
action, in which alone the whole man is seen; will and 
action, then, are of central importance. The four propo¬ 
sitions tend thus to fall together. And they all put 
emphasis on seeing life whole. 

A brief summary may be made of the practical sugges¬ 
tions coming from these four great inferences. 

From the first inference comes the necessity of a store 
of permanent and valuable interests—one of the great 
ends of education and of all growth—and of realizing that 
life is completely interrelated in all its parts, and cannot 
be sharply divided off nor summed up in short and simple 
formulas; but rather has its constant paradoxes which 
we cannot safely ignore. It is this complexity which 
Lecky has in mind in his Map of Life , in what he calls 
“the importance of compromise in practical life.” And 
it is this upon which James is insisting also, when he urges 
“the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its 
proper place in our mental life.” 

The second great inference contends that we must keep 
constantly in mind the unity of man’s nature, and recog¬ 
nizes that we cannot tear ourselves down at one point and 
leave the rest of our life unaffected, and that real educa¬ 
tion, on the other hand, anywhere is education everywhere. 
It demands that all sides of man’s nature are to be taken 
into account. It suggests, too, the importance of remem¬ 
bering the mutual influence of body and mind. 

The third great inference , the central importance of will 
and action, indicates that work—adequate expressive 


The Psychological Approach 39 

activity—is one of the greatest means to character, in¬ 
fluence and happiness alike; as the mood of work—the 
objective, self-forgetful mood—is a prime condition of the 
finest living. 

The -fourth inference gives a like emphasis to the 
personal and social everywhere, to personal association as 
the greatest of all means for largeness of life, and to 
respect for personality, including self-respect and respect 
for others, as the supreme condition of all fine personal 
relations. 

If I am right in these four great inferences, they 
directly suggest, as laws of our own natures, the funda¬ 
mental means and spirit required for education, for 
growth, for all true living. For the great means 
required 10 for these all-inclusive ends are, first, a life 
sufficiently complex to give acquaintance with the great 
fundamental facts of the world, on the one hand, and to 
call out the entire man, on the other; second, the com- 
pletest possible expressive activity on the part of the 
growing individual; and third, personal association with 
broad and wise and noble lives. And the corresponding 
spirit demanded for all true life and growth must be, first, 
broad and catholic in both senses—as responding to a 
wide range of interests, on the one hand, and looking to the 
all-round development of the individual, on the other hand; 
second, objective rather than self-centred and introspec¬ 
tive; and third, imbued with the fundamental convictions 
of the social consciousness. Psychology seems to make 
clear that these are always the greatest and the alone 
indispensable means and conditions in training for life, and 
they contain in themselves the great sources of character, 
of happiness, and of influence. The supreme opportunity, 
in other words, that life offers at its best, is opportunity 
10 King, Personal and Ideal Elements in Education, pp. 1-70. 


40 


Seeing Life Whole 

to use one’s full powers in a wisely chosen, complex 
environment, in association with the best—and all this in 
an atmosphere catholic in its interests, objective in spirit 
and method, and democratic, unselfish, and finely reverent 
in its personal relations. 

VI 

Now these fundamental means and conditions seem to 
me to be all indubitably Christian emphases , and to fit 
closely into our moral and religious goal. I do not see 
that Christianity has any quarrel with these psychological 
inferences at any point, but may well believe that they 
come from the same God who revealed himself supremely 
in Christ. 

For even the complexity of life and the unity of man's 
nature are strongly felt, for example, in the extended 
recognition, by the New Testament, of paradox, especially 
the paradox of saving the life by losing it,—putting 
always the relative goods in the relative place,—and the 
paradox of liberty and law, 11 with which not less than 
five New Testament books have to do. The unity of man’s 
spirit, indeed, is one of the four fundamental motives 
that run right through the Sermon on the Mount. 

In like manner psychology’s emphasis on expressive 
activity —on work calling out the whole man as a great 
means to character, influence, and happiness, is an ac¬ 
curate echo of the contentions of Jesus: “Not every one 
that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the king¬ 
dom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father 
who is in heaven.” “Every one therefore that heareth 
these words of mine, and doeth them, shall be likened unto 
a wise man, who built his house upon the rock.” 12 

11 King, Fundamental Questions, Ch. V. 

u Matt. 7:21, 24. 



The Psychological Approach 41 

So, too, psychology’s emphasis on the concrete facts , 
on persons, and on personal association as the supreme 
means to character, influence, and happiness, is paralleled 
at every point by Christ’s contentions. For Christianity 
is an historical religion that intends above all not to rest 
on abstract principles, but to keep close to the concrete 
reality of the personality of Jesus. Herrmann is inter¬ 
preting accurately Christ’s own view of life when he says 
so expressly: “In its commencement and in all its develop¬ 
ment alike, Christian faith is nothing else than trust in 
persons and in the powers of personal life.” 13 The great 
way in which the kingdom of Christ is to come is by the 
method of the contagion of the good life—the salt of the 
earth—through personal association. 

A like parallel could be shown to exist between the spirit 
fundamentally demanded by modern psychology and the 
spirit required by Christ—broad, catholic, objective, self- 
forgetful, permeated by reverence for personality. 

vn 

The simple truth is that psychology has much help to 
give in bringing in the fruits of practical religion; but the 
help must come chiefly from such sober fundamental 
psychological principles as those of which we have been 
speaking, rather than from the magic of “new thought,” 
, of self-hypnotism, and the revelling in the subconscious,— 
with all of which our time is rife; as a multitude of 
advertisements in city papers bear witness, which promise 
in miraculous fashion to furnish power and success to 
order and over-night. 

This is not to say that there is no value in certain 
psychological suggestions particularly stressed just now; 

13 The Communion of the Christian with God, p. 228. 



42 


Seeing Life Whole 

in carefully directed selective attention; or in remember¬ 
ing that we have much to do with determining our own 
environment and our dominant moods; or, in somewhat 
abnormal cases, in expert analysis of relatively subcon¬ 
scious life, in order to discover unwholesome suppressions; 
or in pointing out how these suppressions of natural in¬ 
stincts may be replaced by a higher use of them; or in 
clear recognition of different levels of energy that may be 
tapped especially by religion or by a great affection. 

But it is to say that magic formulas cannot take the 
place of breadth of view, of rational purpose, and of a 
soundly developed personality; that self-hypnosis is not 
the normal road to high moral and religious achievement, 
and is often most deceiving—a kind of intoxication in 
which discrimination has ceased; that denial of plain 
scientific facts is a road to inner dishonesty not to reli¬ 
gious faith; that relying upon the inspiration of the sub¬ 
conscious in automatic writing does not promise better but 
poorer results; for the higher faculties of judgment and 
self-control are in abeyance. In other words, there is a 
kind of patent-medicine use of supposed principles of 
psychology to-day that is nauseating and misleading. 
Professor Dewey’s sober words need to be heeded: 14 

“Any critical appraisal of such methods as those of 
Coueism seems to imply lack of sympathy for those who are 
relieved. Any relief, it would seem, is at least so much net 
gain. But all cheap, short cuts which avoid recognition of 
basic causes have to be paid for at a great cost. The great¬ 
est cost is that palliative and remedial measures put off the 
day in which fundamental causal factors are faced and con¬ 
structive action undertaken. They perpetuate the domination 
of life by reverie, magic, superficiality and evasion; they 
perpetuate, that is, the sickness of the world. As long as 
the mind is set upon curing we shall need to be cured. 

14 The New Republic, January 24, 1923. 


The Psychological Approach 43 

Only education and re-education into normal conditions of 
growth accomplishes anything positive and enduring.” 15 

If, then, we are to rely only upon truly fundamental 
psychological principles and assured results, for signifi¬ 
cant moral and religious help from psychology, we are 
perhaps bound to illustrate by suggestion at least in a 
single problem—that of self-mastery—both the psycho¬ 
logical and the Christian methods of solution,—in order 
to see how truly they harmonize and how really they help. 

We may stop for a moment for a brief consideration of 
the more general problem of the psychology of power. 
As James long ago pointed out, men have different levels 
of energy available, far beyond their normal expenditure; 
but these levels are not directly to be tapped by mere 
force of will. Rather is it true that our most important 
decisions in life are themselves not commonly made by a 
“slow dead heave” of the will, but in “a sober and stren¬ 
uous mood,” some of the conditions of which, personal 
and social, are clear. We can do something to induce 
this sober and strenuous mood through attention to the 
great spiritual realities and to the deepest interests of our 
lives, and often through association with others. The 
levels of energy are most readily tapped by the great 
experiences of religion and of other primary instincts. 
And even these other primary instincts can be made to 
help the higher life, not by negative suppression, but by 
giving these instincts a new and significant content and 
field, just as an uplifting romantic love has in western 
civilization grown out of the simple sex instinct. As 
another has said of the primitive instincts of fear and of 

15 For a recent sober and helpful discussion of some of these newer 
topics, from the religious point of view, see “The Psychology of 
Power,” “The Psychology of Grace,” and “The Psychology of 
Inspiration,” in The Spirit (edited by Streeter), pp. 68-112, 157-188, 
195-219. 


44 


Seeing Life Whole 

self-assertion as well as of sex: “Abolish them we cannot; 
to suppress them is to deprive ourselves of their forces. 
To convert them and to redirect their forces to higher 
purposes is the work of beings possessed of intelligence, of 
will, and of an ideal.” 16 Here religion becomes what 
James called it,—the great unlocker of the powers of men. 

We turn now to the closely related and less general 
problem of self-mastery , for it is worth while to see, even 
if only by barest suggestion, how large and many-sided 
the problem is; how impossible it is to solve it by short 
cuts and formulas; how imperatively, therefore, it de¬ 
mands a large survey and penetrating discernment of the 
laws of our being and their involved conditions. 

The problem of self-mastery is the problem of guiding 
one’s powers and possessions to their true goal. It is an 
absolutely fundamental problem , basic to all achievement. 
It includes the mastery of one’s appetites and passions 
and powers—not simply by suppression; the mastery of 
one’s possessions—that one may own his possessions and 
not be owned by them; the mastery of one’s fears and 
anxieties. So large is the problem. And we must confine 
our discussion at this point to the single realm of appe¬ 
tites and passions and powers. Even so, the problem 
includes the problem of temperance in all appetites, the 
problem of personal purity, the problem of the control of 
temper, the problem of the control of the tongue, and the 
problem of right habits. 

First of all, self-mastery needs self-knowledge —knowl¬ 
edge of one’s own temperament and of one’s elements of 
strength and weakness; recognition of the kind of memory 
one has; whether one is prevailingly emotional or intellec¬ 
tual or volitional; whether one is naturally dramatic, or 
prone naturally to laziness, etc. 

10 The Spirit, edited by Streeter, p. 96. 



45 


The Psychological Approach 

Self-mastery, too, needs knowledge of the laws of nature 
and of human nature —the realm in which one’s fight must 
be made—and a determined purpose habitually to fulfil the 
conditions involved in those laws. So only can one be 
sure that he is not fighting against the laws of the universe, 
but is enlisting as allies in his struggle the forces of exter¬ 
nal nature and of his own nature. 

These laws of human nature and their conditions in¬ 
clude many suggestions. The chief physical condition of 
self-mastery is surplus nervous energy. For that is the 
chief physical condition of power of attention; and power, 
under the stress of temptation, to keep attention fixed on 
the larger goods is the secret of victory. Self-mastery 
needs, too, definitely to call in the power of habit in the 
right directions, to reinforce the right decision at every 
point, remembering that there are good habits as well as 
bad. 

Self-mastery is not the asceticism of a contempt for the 
body or for the gifts that come through the body; but it 
does involve recognition of the true place and aim of these 
sense elements of our natures as real goods, though only 
relative goods, and the purpose to keep the relative goods 
in their relative place. 

Self-mastery, then, is not negative—the attempt simply 
to suppress the evil, but positive—replacing the evil with 
the good. And that requires engrossing interests other 
than those that tempt to evil. All sane living requires a 
wide circle of interests to assure freedom from an insistent 
single interest, and because the man of many interests is 
much more sure to find the key to any new complex situa¬ 
tion in which he may find himself. And more than this 
must be true. The man of self-mastery must have caught 
the vision of great interests , of great causes , and of great 
enthusiasms , that bring him deliverance from evil because 




46 Seeing Life Whole 

he has found something else so vastly more worth while 
to do. 

One gets still closer to the deep sources of self-mastery 
when he sees that self-mastery looks also to self-respect 
and respect for the personality of others . For true self- 
respect is based on the recognition of one’s own unique 
individuality, and consequent possible contribution to 
society. Such self-respect is a distinct element of power 
and helps directly to self-control. So, too, the growing 
sense of the value and sacredness of the personality of 
others directly counterworks that contempt for person¬ 
ality which underlies all moral outrage, and so is basic to 
self-mastery. 

Moreover, we learn to serve by serving; and to render 
unselfish, reverent, loving service to others itself insures 
the continuation of such service, and the vital practice of 
self-mastery. It is the laboratory method in morals. 

But the one great road to self-mastery, as to all high 
achievement in character, is personal association with the 
best, and primarily—the Christian believes—with Christ. 
And religion brings one more great motive for self-mastery 
to bear—the certainty that God’s will in duty, as a 
Father’s will, is inevitably not hindrance and limitation 
but a great way to life. 

These—in barest outline—are some of the chief psycho¬ 
logical considerations which need to be taken into account 
in the problem of self-mastery. They may perhaps sug¬ 
gest, at least, how real, how comprehensive, and how vital 
is the psychological approach to a Christian philosophy 
of life. 

VIII 

We have been surveying that part of the central prob¬ 
lem of self-mastery which has to do with the control of 



The Psychological Approach j 47 

appetites and passions and powers, approaching the prob¬ 
lem from the side of psychology, from the laws especially 
of human nature. To see now the essential harmony of 
the revelation of the secrets of self-mastery—whether ex¬ 
pressed in the laws of human nature, or in Christ’s life 
and teaching—we may well consider another aspect of 
self-mastery,— the mastery of one's fears and anxieties, as 
Christ points the way . 

Christ means to emancipate his disciples from fear of 
the natural ills of poverty, suffering, age, failure, and 
death . 

These are all very natural subjects of human anxiety, 
no doubt. Christ, it should be clearly seen, does not deny 
their existence in the life of men, nor promise his disciples 
exemption from them. And yet he is profoundly con¬ 
cerned to deliver his disciples from the weakening fear of 
any of these natural ills. Let us see what it means to face 
them squarely in the spirit of Christ. 

Christ, in the first place, confronts them all with his one 
unconquerable faith— faith in the invincible love of God. 
Nothing can replace that. That, he says, you may 
absolutely rely upon, whatever the seeming; and it is the 
root of a peace the world can neither give nor take away. 
This is no religious cant. It is Christ’s profoundest con¬ 
viction, for which no facts are too hard, and which he 
wants to share with every disciple. The endless fruitful¬ 
ness for the life of men of his own baffling crucifixion and 
death is no small part of his proof. 

But, in the second place, Christ has to say concerning 
all these natural ills that anxiety about them is quite 
misplaced. They are not proper subjects for anxiety at 
all. He does not say, “Do not be too anxious about 
them.” He says, “Be not anxious”; “Fear not.” It is as 
though he were saying, If you want a truly satisfying life, 


48 


Seeing Life Whole 

you must get, above all, a different viewpoint. Do not 
concentrate your attention on things. “For even in a 
man’s abundance, his life is not from the things which he 
possesseth.” You can be perfectly certain of that. You 
may go through life and never miss a good meal, never 
lack for ready money, never have an illness, never fail in 
your plans for material prosperity, and live to a green old 
age, and still have lived a worthless and contemptible life, 
deserving the contempt of others and your own self¬ 
contempt. You have the breadth of your own nature to 
reckon with, and the fundamental laws of human life, 
which are laws of God. Supremely regard these, and you 
cannot fail in what most concerns you. For any satisfy¬ 
ing life, things are incidental and are best taken inci¬ 
dentally. Christ’s own life is proof. He knew by experi¬ 
ence what these natural ills meant. Nevertheless he was 
the great bearer of life. And he does not deal softly with 
his disciples. Rather he urges, “It is enough for the 
disciple that he be as his master.” His appeal is to the 
heroic in men. “If any man would come after me, let him 
deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me.” 

What, then, is one to say, from Christ’s point of view, 
to these different natural ills that in some form and 
degree are likely to come into any life—poverty, suffering, 
old age, failure, and death? 

First, so far as they are the natural lot of men, one is 
not to cringe and play the coward. Just because they 
have some element of naturalness in them, they are not 
merely arbitrary and meaningless, but have valuable dis¬ 
cipline to give. And, moreover, no ill is lessened but only 
increased by cringing cowardice. 

One is to make sure, too, in the second place, that these 
natural ills do not come upon him, or that their terrors 
are not increased , through his own fault ,—through care- 


The Psychological Approach 49 

less or wilful disobedience to the laws of life. That will 
remove their w r orst sting. 

With reference to others, the Christian disciple is also 
to have his earnest part in forwarding a civilization that 
shall be so reverent of the person, so emphatic in putting 
persons above things, so insistent that the standards and 
ideals of Christ are to prevail in all human relations, that 
all the human power and resource can do will be done to 
lessen the unnecessary bitterness of these natural ills. 

Let the Christian man make it certain to himself, too, 
that it is necessary for him to be a true man , and to take 
without a whimper whatever that involves. Even Pompey 
could rise to the dignity of saying, when warned of the 
danger of a course he was to take: “It is necessary for 
me to go. It is not necessary for me to live.” Comfort, 
and even life, can be had on terms plainly impossible to 
the true man. One cannot consent to play the despicable 
part of that member of the arctic exploring party who 
had to be shot because, to satisfy his own desire, he was 
stealing from the scanty stock of food that, daily weighed 
out, alone stood between the whole group and starvation. 
Suppose he had carried his plan through to the end,— 
successfully and undetected, and had alone survived, how 
horrible still his everlasting self-contempt! 

I was ashamed, I dared not lift my eyes, 

I could not bear to look upon the skies; 

What I had done! sure, everybody knew! 

From everywhere hands pointed where I stood, 

And scornful eyes were piercing through and through 
The moody armour of my hardihood. 

I heard their voices too, each word an asp 
That buzz’d and stung me sudden as a flame; 

And all the world was jolting on my name. 

And now and then there came a wicked rasp 
Of laughter, jarring me to deeper shame. 


50 


Seeing Life Whole 

And then I looked, but there was no one nigh, 

No eyes that stabbed like swords or glinted sly. 

No laughter creaking on the silent air: 

And then I found that I was all alone 
Facing my soul, and next I was aware 
That this mad mockery was all my own. 17 

Moreover, this is God’s world, and the Christian is to 
believe m His providence; not as guarding him from all 
discomfort,—Christ expressly denies that; but as always 
caring, and as finally overruling. The Christian may 
know that so far as he proves himself a true disciple of 
Christ, he is “immortal till his work is done,” as old 
Thomas Fuller insisted. Even death, for the Christian, is 
not necessarily an evil. And so Jesus urges with his 
disciples: “Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and 
after that have no more that they can do. But I will 
warn you whom ye shall fear: Fear Him who after He 
hath killed hath power to cast into hell. Yea, I say unto 
you, Fear Him.” That is, fear God; fear for your inner 
life, and let this nobler fear cast out all meaner fears. 

Let the disciple of Christ, too, gird up the loins of his 
soul anew by remembering that if poverty and suffering 
and outward defeat come to the servant of God in the 
path of duty, and in spite of fidelity in earnest and loving 
service, they still cannot deprive him of the far greater 
riches that money cannot buy —the inner riches of the 
friendly life, of the love and trust and gratitude of men, 
of work worth doing, and of the joy of fidelity and of inner 
victory, of rising to the height of great causes and high 
enthusiasms, and sharing in God’s own purposes and 
triumphs. For what else does life exist? You cannot be 
defeated in the highest but by your own consent. 

No outward calamities, be it recalled, can carry any 
w James Stevens. 


The Psychological Approach 51 

such loss as the steady deterioration of selfish , unscrupu~ 
louSy parasitic wealth. As Carpenter says: 

“Like other problems the problem of property is best solved 
indirectly. That is, not by seeking material wealth directly, 
but by seeking that of which material wealth is only the 
symbol. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom . . . and all these things 
shall be added unto you.’ Vaguely metaphysical as these 
words sound, yet I believe they express a literal fact. . . . 
Seeking ease we have found disease; scrambling for wealth, 
our civilization has become poverty-stricken beyond all ex¬ 
pression ; prizing mere technical knowledge, we have for¬ 
gotten the existence of wisdom; and setting up material 
property as our deity, we have dethroned the ruling power 
in our own natures. Not till this last is restored can we 
possibly attain to possession of the other things.” 18 

And for the life that has been unselfish, genuinely true 
and friendly, faithful in its following of Christ, the deeper 
wretchedness of poverty , of suffering , of defeat , of old age 9 
and of death is simply impossible. Is it poverty that 
threatens? The roots of his life lie deeper than things. 
Is he in the grip of suffering? He has learned to con¬ 
vert his sufferings into sacrifices to God and men, and 
so into an instrument of joy. Has he seemed to fail? In 
the midst of outer failure, he remembers that he is the 
disciple of a Master who seemed, too, to be utterly 
defeated. Is old age coming on? He refuses to be cowed 
by the thought of age; for ugly and sordid age cannot be 
the lot of the man who has sowed persistently the seed of 
purity and love. Is death in store? Death itself, in the 
thought of the Christian man, is but the gateway to a 
larger life and a more transcendent service. The true 
follower of Christ has been set at liberty from the bondage 
of these natural ills. He is a free man. 

M England’s Ideal, pp. 159-160, quoted by Moffatt. 


52 


Seeing Life Whole 

The great convictions, ideals, and hopes of religion, as 
expressed by Christ, aim thus to bring to men power and 
freedom and victory. While these great motives of reli¬ 
gion transcend in their sweep the simply psychological 
considerations from man’s nature, they nevertheless fit 
right into the great psychological laws and naturally 
supplement them. The psychological and the religious 
motives are at home with each other; they belong together; 
they obey essentially the same laws; they are in thorough 
harmony. There is a real and helpful psychological 
approach to a Christian philosophy of life. 


CHAPTER III 




THE VALUE APPROACH 1 

I 

It is hard to realize the truth of Schiller’s statement: 
“Value is one of the last of the great philosophic topics to 
have received recognition. . . . Its discovery was prob¬ 
ably the greatest philosophic achievement of the nine¬ 
teenth century.” 2 But even within the comparatively 
short period which has elapsed, some things have become 
fairly clear. The discussion of values began with the 
sense of the oppositions of “fact” and “value,” of the 
“is,” and the “ought ” of the standpoints of “description” 
and “appreciation”—or, as we have been saying, of the 
question of process, and the question of meaning. But 
as the discussion has gone on, as Schiller puts it: 3 

“In general it may be concluded that, since values inhere 
in all the ‘facts’ that are recognized as such, they are them¬ 
selves facts, and that the antithesis between values and facts 
cannot be made absolute. Values are not simply fortuitous 
and gratuitous additions to facts, which are merely subjective 
and should be eliminated by strict science, but are essential 
to cognitive process and compatible with any sort and degree 

1 1 am seeking in this chapter to make a somewhat complete state¬ 
ment of a line of thought which I have found very suggestive and 
helpful in giving religion its setting in the whole realm of the 
ideal—the close kinship of those values which we count most sig¬ 
nificant. The discussion here may be regarded as a development of 
the partial treatment of this subject in Chapter II of Religion as 
Life. 

a F. C. S. Schiller, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, article 
“Value,” Vol. XII, p. 584. 

8 Op. cit., p. 587. 


53 


54 


Seeing Life Whole 

of objectivity. ... It would seem to follow from the rela¬ 
tions between value and fact that values cannot be denied 
existence in any world that can exist for man, and this in 
several senses.” 

It should therefore be said from the beginning of our 
discussion of values, that value as here used is not intended 
to be subjective in the sense of denying the reality of the 
relation of inner experience to objective fact, but only in 
the sense that “a relation to personality is inherent in all 
values .” The experience in itself, in the first place, is a 
great fact in the world, as Schleiermacher and Ritschl 
have both made clear. Indeed, the experience of the beau¬ 
tiful, for example, in thoughtful minds, may be said to be 
a real goal of the external world, and in that sense the 
external world exists for the sake of the enjoying mind. 
Moreover, the sense of value, as religion uses it, is 
grounded in a faith that the world actually has meaning 
and value—a purpose of love at its heart. The ideal view 
so expresses its basic faith in a world in which are to be 
found the objective grounds for the conservation and 
progress of values—faith ultimately in God. 

To find one’s way into appreciation and conviction of 
the great values of life is certainly a chief end both of 
education and of life. The culture of an educated man 
implies the discovery and appreciation of an increasing 
store of permanent and valuable interests. And really to 
live with breadth and intensity requires a vital sense of 
the great values. Life is fundamentally cheapened 
wherever we lose the sense of worth out of it. Just be¬ 
cause, for most of us, as Carlyle says, the miraculous by 
simple repetition ceases to be miraculous, we need the help 
of the poet, the artist, and the seer. For it is the very 
business and mission of poet and artist and seer to keep 



55 


The Value Approach 

within themselves the responsiveness of youth to the won¬ 
der and beauty of life, to preserve the glory of the 
commonplace, in order that they may help the rest of us 
. to a like vision. So Kipling thanks God that he has seen 
naught common on His earth. 

The thesis of this chapter is that the way into apprecia¬ 
tion and conviction of all the great values of life is 
essentially the same way, whether they are the esthetic 
values of the beautiful in music and art and literature; 
the unifying intellectual values of the scientific spirit and 
method, or of the historical spirit, or of the philosophic 
mind; the priceless personal values of friendship; or the 
values of our great moral and religious ideals,—the all- 
inclusive values of the true, of the good, and of the 
beautiful. 

Now, if the way into all these great values of life is 
essentially the same way, it is plain that this will bring a 
sense of unity and simplicity into life that could hardly 
come otherwise. And just as in modern science the sense 
of law brings conviction of possible achievement, so in 
these various realms of value the sense of unity brings a 
like assurance of reality and hope. For, if there is one 
way into all the great values of life, that very fact will 
help us to discern, too, the chief directions of significant 
living. Each value will help all the other values and in 
turn cannot spare the help of these others. Religion, thus, 
decidedly loses where it does not use the value approach 
or, in particular, the esthetic analogy. So remarkable 
and so honest a book as Herrmann’s The Communion of 
the Christian with God , for example, with its emphasis on 
judgments of worth, would gain much in concrete and 
vivid putting by a far freer use of the esthetic analogy. 

What , then , is the one great way into the values of 
life? 


56 


Seeing Life Whole 


ii 

First of all, we are commonly introduced into the values 
of life through the testimony of others , who have preceded 
us in appreciation of the value. It is in this way that 
values of all kinds spread from mind to mind and make 
their headway in society. For we are all born into a 
world in which many are already living in the enjoyment 
of life’s significant values. And this very fact calls our 
attention to these values. The constant and inevitable 
factor of imitation, also, that is often unconscious, is 
always at work in our human relations, and tending to 
reproduce in one person the sense of value found in 
another. Both these facts make plain the folly of attempt¬ 
ing to discover all values anew for ourselves. Before we 
could set before ourselves any conscious search for valu¬ 
able interests, we should already be sharing in them, 
through association with others. What McDougall says 
of the moral sentiments may be said of all our values: 
“No man could acquire by means of his own unaided 
reflections and unguided emotions any considerable array 
of moral sentiments; still less could he acquire in that way 
any consistent and lofty system of them.” 4 

It becomes the very business of a teacher, thus, to be an 
honest and effective witness to such values as he has him¬ 
self attained in the sphere of his own best study and 
living. And similarly this is also the precise business of 
the literary or musical or art critic. Men want from the 
critic honest testimony concerning his real impression of 
the art product under discussion,—testimony that is born 
out of his larger experience, his expert knowledge, and his 
superior insight. The critic is thus primarily an intro¬ 
ducer to the great values of which he speaks. And the 

4 Social Psychology, p. 219. 


57 


The Value Approach 

traveler prizes his Baedeker in the art galleries of Europe 
—though he may sometimes scoff at it—just because the 
selection of pictures with its asterisks and double asterisks 
is believed to reflect the expert knowledge and superior 
insight of longer and larger experience than his own. The 
traveler might be glad, if indefinite time were at his dis¬ 
posal, to try to make his own discoveries of the best 
pictures in the collection he is studying, but just because 
for him “Art is long and Time is fleeting,” he gratefully 
accepts the help of those who can introduce him to the 
best. It is in this fashion, indeed, that all values ordi¬ 
narily come to one. The pictures, the music, the poems; 
the scientific, historical, and philosophical insights; the 
friends; the moral and religious ideals which we have and 
which mean most to us, have all come, for the most part, 
through the introduction of some other. But even the 
competent critic can only introduce one to the values of 
which he speaks. What measure of attainment one is then 
to make in them depends on oneself. 

So even religion makes its wag among men. “The pro¬ 
gram of Christianity,” as Professor Bosworth says, “is the 
conquest of the world by a campaign of testimony through 
empowered witnesses.” It is not by accident, therefore, 
that in John’s Gospel, side by side with the great words, 
Life, Light, Truth, Love, is the other word, Witness. 
Nor is it by accident that the Gospel sums up the life and 
message of John the Baptist by saying: “There came a 
man, sent from God, whose name was John. The same 
came for witness, that he might bear witness of the Light, 
that all might believe through him. He was not the Light, 
but came that he might bear witness of the Light.” 5 We 
too seldom appreciate our deep debt to the original Chris¬ 
tian witnesses. 


6 John 1: 6-8. 


58 


Seeing Life Whole 

We shall better understand the prime significance of the 
work of the honest and effective witness if we remember 
that there are only two supreme services which we can 
render to one another: the witness of life, on the one hand, 
and the witness of word, on the other. For the first 
witness comes through the contagion of a good life, 
through the unconscious influence of an incarnated ideal. 
It is one’s greatest gift to another, because it is the gift 
of oneself. Life comes from life. And the witness by word 
is the sharing of our own best vision through honest testi¬ 
mony to the best we know, to what means most to us, to 
the chief sources of our life. The Christian’s sincere 
testimony—that in all the higher ranges of his life he lives 
by Christ, by convictions and motives and ideals that came 
from him—is a supreme example of the kind of testimony 
by which all values go forward. And these two witnesses 
of life and of word are closely interrelated and supple¬ 
mentary, and we cannot wisely separate them. 

Now if these two witnesses of life and of word are the 
two supreme services which men can render to one another, 
it concerns us to ask what makes a man’s influence and 
testimony count with us? What are the qualities of an 
effective witness? For these qualities would be the elements 
of the highest success in life, the conditions of the richest 
giving of ourselves in all our personal relations, the quali¬ 
ties which mark the good seed of the Kingdom, the quali¬ 
ties of the persons who are to help to insure the progress 
of the race. What are these qualities ? 

One direct answer is, that they are the qualities of the 
Beatitudes; for Christ counted these the characteristics 
of the citizen of the new kingdom which he came to set up; 
and they include naturally the personal and social quali¬ 
ties of high influence. 

A second answer is to be found in analyzing out the 


59 


The Value Approach 

qualities of the effective witness, who, if he is to be a 
genuinely moral force, must be not dominating but truly 
persuasive. What, then, makes a man’s testimony to a 
person, a cause, a great interest or value of any kind, 
count? What are the qualities of the men who best help 
us to come with appreciation and conviction into the 
values of music and art and literature, the values of the 
scientific and historic and philosophic spirit, the values of 
friendship, the values of moral and religious ideals—the 
all-embracing values of the true, the good, and the beau¬ 
tiful? 

The answer probably must be, first of all, the man's 
own conviction. For you must be impressed by the man’s 
own deep-going belief in what he is bearing witness to,— 
whether by life or by word. You must be sure that those 
who bear witness to the true, the good, and the beautiful 
have themselves indubitably caught the vision. Nothing 
can replace a man’s own conviction as an element of power. 
He must demonstrate that he has here something that he 
believes in with all his soul. His influence will be measured 
not by the length of his creed, but by the depth of con¬ 
viction behind it. A solid, enduring fulcrum is necessary 
to the exercise of influence. Deep convictions form that 
fulcrum. The man of conviction can be no sophist, 
though sophistry is a real danger in education. From 
the very breadth of their outlook, highly educated men 
sometimes cultivate a fatal facility in finding reasons for 
doing what they want to do. To have found a specious 
excuse for not doing one’s duty seems well nigh as satis¬ 
factory to many as to have accomplished the duty set. 
We cannot do justice, either, to the necessity of conviction 
without remembering that breadth is not lack of dis¬ 
crimination, nor tolerance lack of conviction. The effec¬ 
tive witness needs, thus, the sense of a vision seen, and 


60 


Seeing Life Whole 

hence a sense of mission and a sense of message. Con¬ 
viction, thus, is the first condition of all for the effective 
witness; but it bears persuasive testimony, it does no 
browbeating. 

The second quality of the effective witness is the man’s 
own character and well-tested judgment in the sphere in 
which he bears witness. There is no cheap way to solid 
and enduring influence. In the last analysis we have only 
ourselves to give. We must speak out of our own experi¬ 
ence. There is no possible way by which we can separate 
the influence of our word from the final influence of our 
personality. There is always a double test in the case of 
any witness, the test both of character and of judgment. 
We must be able to trust the character of the witness and 
his unquestioned competence in the sphere in which he is 
speaking. He must have earned the right to speak, from 
long and significant experience. Weighing evidence, in 
the last analysis, must be weighing witnesses. How large 
and rich and significant is the personality back of the 
witness? This is the question that presses. The “forceful 
man” in the realm of values is necessarily the man of both 
character and judgment. 

The third quality of the effective witness is disinterested 
love. We must be able to believe that the witness who 
would introduce us to some great value of life has no selfish 
scheme of his own to work. He must be felt to seek sin¬ 
cerely the good of others. For there are few conditions of 
influence which lie deeper than that it can be said of a 
man that he forgets himself in his cause. Undoubtedly 
one of the chief reasons why Mr. Roosevelt weighed so 
much and so long with men of all parties was because men 
had the feeling that he did so many things which no one 
could believe it was simply politic to do. On the other 
hand, influence tends to go when yielding to selfish advan- 


61 


The Value Approach 

tage comes in. The public man, above all, who wishes to 
count profoundly in the life of the nation and not as a 
demagogue must keep himself above suspicion. He must 
be no grafter in any sense or degree; he must not cheaply 
lend his name; he must not profit selfishly by the position 
held. He is to be no player of politics. The unselfish love 
of an effective witness, too, must be so disinterested, so 
sensitive to the deeper conditions of another’s good as 
sacredly to respect the personality of that other, and so 
for this reason, too, not to mistake domination for in¬ 
fluence. 

These, then, are the three broad qualifications of the 
effective witness: conviction, character and judgment, dis¬ 
interested love. If a man has these he can hardly help 
being effective. 

But there is a fourth quality not unimportant: power to 
put one's testimony home , that is , power to make the value 
to which witness is borne real , rational and vital. This, 
for example, is what the Christian prophet would wish to 
do with reference to the great Christian truths: to put 
his testimony to these truths in such fashion as first of all 
to make them real —real as the realest things of the daily 
life, seen to be inevitably related to those realities of which 
we are most certain. And rational in the true sense—not 
rationalizing, giving trumped-up reasons for foregone 
conclusions—but showing that these great Christian 
truths are knit up with the best thinking one can any¬ 
where do; that they are part and parcel of a unified 
rational world, so that one can be sure that, when he turns 
his face toward God he does not turn his back upon the 
reason with which God endowed him. And vital —seen to 
spring up inevitably out of life, in closest relations with 
life, and having abiding motive, dynamic, and leading 
for life. 


62 


Seeing Life Whole 

In finding our way, then, into the great values of life, 
we are commonly introduced through the testimony of 
others, who have preceded us in the appreciation of these 
values. And those who can best give us this vital help 
must be those who have the qualities of the effective 
witness. 


hi 

In this introduction to the values of life through the 
witness of others we have been emphasizing one side of the 
moral law, as we have seen that Herrmann characterizes 
it: “Mental and spiritual fellowship among men.” We 
turn now to the other side of the moral law: “Mental and 
spiritual independence on the part of the individual’*— 
absolute honesty. For if one would find his way into 
genuine appreciation of any of these great values— 
esthetic, intellectual, personal, moral or religious—he 
must have downright inner honesty. He must be honest, 
first of all, with himself, and not less with others, from 
whom he receives such values, or to whom he is in turn to 
bring his introducing witness. Or, in other words, the way 
into all the great values of life must be marked by reality 
at every point. One must himself be real, must get at 
reality in the value which he is seeking, and there must be 
corresponding reality in his own witness. Unreality is a 
root peril. 

On the one hand, then, there must be complete honesty — 
no pretence of any hind—in our origmal experience. 
Whether in art or in religion, whether in the intellectual 
values of the scientific and philosophical spirit, or in the 
great fundamental values of friendship, there is to be no 
pretending to feel, to see, to enjoy, or to know what for us 
is not really there. We cannot build an honest structure 
on a sham foundation. Every bit of inbuilt sham only 


63 


The Value Approach 

hinders real growth in an appreciation of one’s own. One 
of my friends, more honest than most of us, found his way 
to the Sistine Chapel in Rome, that he might see Michael 
Angelo’s great frescoes, and admitted his disappointment 
in them. But he realized nevertheless that the fault might 
not be wholly Michael Angelo’s; and yet he would not 
simply take over passively the judgment of the critics. 
So he came back day after day to see if he could not dis¬ 
cover for himself something of the greatness of the fres¬ 
coes. In all this, he was only insisting on an honest 
experience of his own. We are all in danger of simply 
taking over passively judgments of others, especially the 
judgment of experts. This is not to deny that the expert 
has a great service to render us, but it must be in the 
direction of our taking time and effort to see for ourselves, 
not of substituting forthwith the results of the expert’s 
observation and thinking for the results of our own obser¬ 
vation and thinking. For example, we shall get most help 
out of a wise commentary on a Biblical passage by first of 
all honestly insisting on finding by genuine study what it 
means to ourselves. Only so can we get the most from 
others, and especially from those who are deservedly 
authorities of the first rank. The insight, thus, the grow¬ 
ing appreciation of the value, must be absolutely one’s 
own or nothing is accomplished. In Raphael’s great pic¬ 
ture of The School at Athens , it will be remembered there 
is at one side of the picture a little group of students of 
geometry gathered about their teacher following a demon¬ 
stration through a design on the floor. The first pupil is 
evidently following the demonstration with full under¬ 
standing; the second pupil does not catch the point and 
turns to see whether the other, leaning above him, sees the 
demonstration. But no seeing by the first or the third 
will help in any way the seeing of the other. He, too, must 


64 


Seeing Life Whole 

see for himself. Another can only give us introduction. 
We have to come through it to insights and convictions 
and ideals of our own. This is the meaning of the two 
proverbs: “You may lead a horse to water but you can’t 
make him drink,” and “Concerning tastes there is no 
disputing.” Here, too, is the needed emphasis on inner 
soundness, which is contained in Christ’s warning against 
the salt that has lost its saltness, the light that is hid. 
First of all, then, in meeting the demand of honesty, of 
true inner integrity, in coming into the great values of 
life, we must be honest with ourselves, absolutely honest in 
our original experience. 

Similarly, there must be ah solute honesty in our own 
witness. Whether for the witness of life or for the 
witness of word, we must be utterly true to ourselves, to 
our own vision. And our witness must be honest testi¬ 
mony, therefore, to real experience. There is to be no 
careless handing on of what we have not ourselves verified. 
The first paragraph of John’s first Epistle precisely 
states the demand which is made upon us here in honest 
dealing with any of the great values of life: “That which 
we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that 
which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the 
Word of life (and the life was manifested, and we have 
seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the 
eternal life, which was with the Father, and was mani¬ 
fested unto us) ; that which we have seen and heard 
declare we unto you also, that ye also may have fellow¬ 
ship with us.” It is because of failure at this point that 
unjustified fads in literary and art criticism, or in 
scientific or philosophical tradition, or in moral or reli¬ 
gious ideal get started. And it is by this insistence on 
challenging every such fad or tradition by honest experi¬ 
ence that such false tendencies are stopped. Some day 


65 


The Value Approach 

the unjustified tradition is challenged, out of the honest 
experience of an honest man, and the false tradition is 
broken, and thought started on a more fruitful way. The 
unreal parts of any discourse or writing, that is intended 
to help men into growing appreciation of any of the great 
values, whether esthetic or ethical or religious, are pretty 
certain to be due to the desire to give what is called a 
“systematic presentation” of the subject, which usually 
means that considerable parts of the “systematic presen¬ 
tation” are not real and vital to the speaker or writer 
himself. They are no real part of his own vivid personal 
experience and therefore no real part of his genuine 
heartfelt message. There is a story of a distinguished 
preacher who got into the midst of his written sermon, to 
find the dismal feeling coming over him that he was saying 
nothing and getting nowhere, and closed his manuscript 
with the remark: “And so on and so on for a good many 
more pages of the same kind of stuff. Let us pray.” 
Whether true or not, the story may well illustrate the 
necessity of rigorously cutting out all that is unreal in 
our testimony concerning vital things. 

IV 

But once more in finding our way into the great values 
of life, of every kind, honesty must be balanced by 
modesty. One may try so hard to be honest as to lean 
over backwards, and to deny getting anything from an¬ 
other, to deny that possible introduction by others, whose 
importance we have seen. There is a balancing quality 
here needed, though it is by no means in the direction of 
any return to unreality. There is, however, probably 
some danger of our feeling that reality lies only within the 
limits of our own original discovery. It is one thing to 


66 


Seeing Life Whole 

say: I do not find anything in Shakespeare or in this fine 
music or in this great ideal; I cannot honestly claim to 
have reached in this sphere of value what others say they 
have reached. That may well be true, and because true, 
worth saying in order to keep the atmosphere of our life 
honest. It is quite another thing, however, to say: 
There isn’t anything more in these values—in Shake¬ 
speare, in this great music, in this moral or religious 
conviction—than I have already discovered. That, we 
can be sure, is not true and is certainly not modest. And 
we should wish to be modest as well as honest, that we 
may attain those larger measures of appreciation of values 
which may come to us through honest sharing in the 
vision of another. Our limited individual experience has 
not exhausted reality. Much, very much, in the line of all 
life’s significant values, we may be sure, remains to be 
achieved. And the much of vital significance that those 
have experienced, who have given most time and thought 
to these realms of value, may well encourage us to con¬ 
tinue our attention and study; though we are absolutely 
determined to take nothing on the simple say-so of an¬ 
other, or on any external authority. We are to be both 
honest and modest. 

In the light of the experience of others in these great 
realms of value, we may then reasonably expect much 
more, even continued growth in these different values. 
The sensible attitude, which we naturally tend to take in 
expecting a growing appreciation of literature and music 
and art and of the scientific and historic and philosophic 
spirit and interest, may quite as well become us in the 
realms of morals and religion, though absolute honesty is 
even more vital at these points. The Bible, thus, it is 
well to remember, is not primarily an authority at all, but 
a record of preeminent religious experience, of honest 


67 


The Value Approach 

vision and insight. And we may reasonably hope for 
much more in sharing in the experience of these great 
spiritual seers who have given most time and thought at 
this point, just as in the case of other values. We need 
the testimony of the great seers and prophets, we need 
their leading, and we may well recognize that fact; though 
we guard punctiliously against every trace of unreality, 
of sham. 

If we are, then, sanely planning for growing apprecia¬ 
tion of the great values of life, the reason why we are 
attending thoughtfully to these various realms of value is 
indeed that we may share, but share honestly and really 
through our own experience, in the insights of the great 
souls who have here achieved most. Herrmann’s caution 
needs constant heeding: “Religious tradition is indis¬ 
pensable for us. But it helps us only if it leads us on to 
listen to what God says to ourselves. Real faith consists 
in obeying this word of God.” 6 We are not, that is, to 
take passively over on authority, even that of prophets 
and apostles, the expressions of their experience as our 
own; but we are to expect to be able to bear similar wit¬ 
ness of our own out of a like experience. This absolute 
but modest loyalty to our own experience is imperative 
for our own life, and it is also the one great contribution 
which it is possible for us to make to others. 

v 

In discussing now the one great way into all the values 
of life, we have recognized the fact and necessity of in¬ 
troduction by others, and of honesty and modesty on the 
part of all seekers after living appreciation of the great 
realms of worth. We have been assuming some general 
8 Faith and Morals, p. 192. 


68 


Seeing Life Whole 

experience of these values on the part of men, and much 
larger experience by some than by others. We have 
recognized that there are something like geniuses in each 
realm of value, who represent the best which the race has 
so far achieved in that particular realm, both in the 
creation of values and in the appreciation of them. To 
these creative genuises and appreciative or interpretative 
genuises the world owes an immeasurable debt; for they 
lead men on, not to a static best but to a dynamic best— 
not to a fixed but to a moving goal. 

Even these supreme witnesses to value in any realm 
must be marked by the qualities of the effective witness. 
We might, therefore, sum up the whole great way into the 
values of life in the single counsel: Stay persistently in 
the presence of the best in each great realm of value ,— 
both of the creative best, and of the appreciative or inter¬ 
pretative best. This one all-inclusive counsel, of staying 
persistently in the presence of the best, is precisely that of 
Paul’s, when he thinks of all the best that life holds: 
“ Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are 
honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things 
are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there 
be any praise, think on these things.” As one runs over 
this great list of values, one expects something much 
more from Paul than his quiet word “think on these 
things.” Yet this is the essence of all growth. 

Whatever the realm of value, from this point of view, 
the counsel must be practically the same: stay persistently 
in the presence of the best, in the sphere in which you seek 
achievement, with honest response; the rest will largely 
take care of itself. Hear the best in music; see the best 
in art; read the best in literature; stay with the best 
creators and interpreters of the scientific and historic and 


69 


The Value Approach 

philosophic spirit; stay with the best in friendship; stay 
with the best in moral and religious insight and achieve¬ 
ment ; and in all with honest response. This is the one 
great central road to enlargement and enrichment of life. 
It is natural that Richard Brook should say: 

“As in the case of music or art we train our perceptions 
and cultivate our taste by the help of the great musicians and 
artists, so also we must train our religious perceptions and 
cultivate our spiritual sense by the help of those who have a 
special genius for religion. . . . How do we recognize or 
test genius in art? There is, perhaps, a threefold test. 
First, the genius is the man who possesses special faculties 
of insight which enable him to catch some glimpse of truth 
or beauty which the ordinary man cannot see. . . . And, 

secondly, he is one who is able through the medium of his 
work to create, in those who study it, emotions akin to those 
which in him inspired that work. Not only does he see a 
vision himself, but he opens our eyes so that we can see it 
too. . . . And, thirdly, the work of the genius must stand 
the test of time. . . . If we apply this threefold test in 
our search for the religious genius—for those by whose help 
w T e can train our religious sense—it is, first and most, to the 
Bible that the facts of history and of experience point us. 
The Bible is for religion what the great masters are for art. 
It is, as has been well said, like ‘a picture gallery of the 
old masters.’ . . . ‘As well imagine a man with a sense for 
sculpture,’ it has been said, ‘not cultivating it by the help 
of the remains of Greek art, or a man with a sense of poetry 
not cultivating it with the help of Homer or Shakespeare, 
as a man with a sense of conduct’ (or, we may add, with a 
sense of religion) ‘not cultivating it by the help of the 
Bible.’ ” 7 


The best, however, as we have already intimated, is not 
to he regarded as a static best , but as a moving goal, 
calling always for the open mind, for growth in every 

1 Foundations, pp. 63-4, 66-7. 


70 


Seeing Life Whole 

value. What McDougall says of moral growth applies 
in much the same way to growth in all the values: “The 
moral tradition of any society lives, in its fullest, com- 
pletest form, only in the strong moral sentiments of a 
comparatively few individuals, those who are expressively 
called ‘the salt of the earth.’ ” 8 

Nor is the best to be narrowly interpreted . At every 
point we need to take account of the wide range of man’s 
being, and to see that the best in every realm must be 
tested by the whole man and by no mere fraction of him. 
The best, too, to which we are to give our time and atten¬ 
tion must be verified by the experience of the race, as the 
enduring, as what bears the test of time, what wears well, 
what the generations find men constantly returning to. An 
able English musical critic has recently insisted that the 
machines for musical reproduction tend inevitably to sift 
out the better music, for it is the better music that wears. 
It is silly to think that we can learn nothing from the 
experience of the race, and make no progress through that 
experience in the knowledge of what is truly best. The 
best in any realm of value, into the appreciation of which 
we seek to come, includes, then, as we have seen, both the 
creative best in that realm—the creative artists, music¬ 
ians, poets, scientists, historians, philosophers, friends, 
and heroes in morals and religion—and the interpretative 
or appreciative best—the competent critics in all these 
realms. The creators of value are not always the best 
interpreters of value. But both the creators and the 
critics, if they are absolutely honest in their witness, have 
much to give. They are the supreme witnesses in all these 
realms of value. 

This implies that the great law of all growth into the 
best of all kinds is the law of personal association — 
8 Social Psychology, p. 220. 


71 


The Value Approach 

the giving of time and thought and attention to the best. 
The law of association becomes thus a supreme law: we 
become like those with whom we constantly are, to whom 
we look with admiration and love, and who give themselves 
unstintedly to us. This applies primarily, of course, in 
those associations which make for character, but it holds 
for all values. We cannot cram culture or insight or 
character or friendship or religion. McDougall points 
out that among all the persons who surround a child in 
its growth, “some will impress their abstract sentiments 
upon him more than others; and, in the main, those that 
so impress him will be those whose power, or achievements, 
or position, evoke his admiration. Of all the affective 
attitudes of one man towards another, admiration is that 
which renders him most susceptible to the other’s in¬ 
fluence.” 9 

It is important also to see that there is no need in any 
realm of reality or of genuine value to pretend or to put 
pressure upon the mind to try to believe. The real, after 
all, will take care of itself. Our one business concerning 
all that is best is simply to let the great value make its 
own legitimate unforced impression upon us. All that 
is needed on our part, in the last analysis, is an absolutely 
honest response. Our one attitude, therefore, concerning 
the great value, the great reality, the great personality, 
is not to put pressure upon our own minds or upon the 
minds of others to believe in them; and not primarily 
either with ourselves or others to defend them or to argue 
for them, but simply to give them opportunity with us, 
and to do what we may to help others too to give that 
opportunity. The best, thus, judges us rather than we it. 
We need have no anxiety for that best, for Shakespeare 
or Beethoven or Raphael or Plato or Christ. They 

9 Op. cit., p. 222. 


72 


Seeing Life Whole 

do not need our defense; they need only opportunity. 
And we have only to give them this opportunity with us, 
through time and thought and persistent attention, to 
insure the enlargement and enrichment of life which only 
the best can give. We are to stay persistently in the 
presence of the best with honest response. 


VI 

But before we turn from our thesis, that the way into 
all the great values of life is essentially the same for all 
these values, it is well clearly to recognize that, in dealing 
with so wide a range of values, it is inevitable that the way 
into these values should not mean precisely the same thing 
for all the values. What is contended for is a broad 
analogy , not an abstract identity. For example, that 
“honest response” which we have just said is demanded 
in the case of all the values means a different tiling for the 
ethical and religious values from what it means for the 
esthetic values. The ethical and religious call not merely 
for esthetic admiration but for personal commitment of 
will. In the case of the ethical and religious there is no 
honest response otherwise. And yet even so, the analogy 
for all the values is closer than it may seem at first. 
There is at least an ethical element in the case of every 
value, which is insisted on in the demand for the hon¬ 
est response. For even esthetic appreciation requires 
honesty and modesty—freedom from sham—as we have 
seen, and these are inevitably ethical qualities. The 
scientific spirit, too, in its demand for honest open-mind¬ 
edness and for an absolutely truthful report upon a situa¬ 
tion, is in itself a moral demand. And the historic spirit 
and philosophic spirit carry in like manner moral elements 


The Value Approach 73 

in them. And every friendship worth talking about has 
a deep ethical basis. 

Moreover, to go a little deeper, the race has probably 
been greatly right in habitually associating in its 
thought the beautiful with the true and the good . We 
never get, in fact, the ideal embodiment of the ideal in 
morals without bringing in the note of the beautiful. 
McDougall, therefore, is surely justified in saying: “It 
is worth noting in passing that in many persons sesthetic 
appreciation of the beauty of fine character and conduct 
may play a large part in the genesis of the ideal of conduct 
and of the sentiment of love for this ideal. Not all 
admiration is sesthetic admiration, but, if the object that 
we admire on account of its strength or excellence of any 
kind, presents a complex of harmoniously organized and 
centralised relations and activities, the mere contempla¬ 
tion of its pleases us, in so far as we are capable of grasp¬ 
ing the harmony of its complex features; that is to say, 
it affords us an sesthetic satisfaction, and therefore has 
a certain value for us and becomes an object of desire.” 10 
As I have elsewhere said, the frequent profoundly moving 
and thrilling power of the beautiful can hardly be under¬ 
stood at all, except upon such a hypothesis as that of 
Lotze, that the beautiful thing, so clearly seen in a mere 
fragment of the world, where we have no right to expect 
it, seems to us a kind of divine prophecy and promise of 
the ultimate harmony of all. And this is an ethical and 
religious ideal as well as an esthetic. 

Moreover, it may well be noted that the way into all 
the great values of life may well be in essence one way, 
when we remember that all values go bach finally to per¬ 
sons. All the esthetic values of music and art and 
literature; all the intellectual values of the scientific, the 

10 Op. ext., p. 227. 


74 


Seeing Life Whole 

historic and the philosophic spirit; all the values of friend¬ 
ship ; and all the values of moral and religious ideal, are, 
after all, but a partial revelation of the riches of some 
personal life. So that what Kaftan calls our life task is 
naturally to enter with appreciation and conviction into 
the great personalities of history. This would be most 
of all to share in their experience of values. For the great 
facts of history are persons, and in all the ranges of 
value we have to do with the great souls, with the pioneers 
and spiritual adventurers in all realms, with discoverers, 
and seers, and heroes, and prophets—and with their great 
witness by life and word. For we live in large part by 
them. As James says: “We draw new life from the 
heroic example. The prophet has drunk more deeply 
than anyone of the cup of bitterness, but his counte¬ 
nance is so unshaken and he speaks such mighty words of 
cheer that his will becomes our will and our life is kindled 
at his own.” No wonder that Browning makes the aged 
John say of Christ: 

Then stand before that fact, that Life and Death, 

Stand there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread, 

As though a star should open out, all sides. 

Grow the world on you, as it is my world. 11 

We are to stay persistently in the presence of the best 
with honest response. 

n A Death in the Desert. 


CHAPTER IV 


THE PERSONAE AND ETHICAX, APPROACH 1 

I 

In the personal and ethical approach to a Christian 
philosophy of life, I am seeking the suggestions and 
guidance of what I have come to believe to be a supreme 
ethical and religious principle —the principle of reverence 
for personality . I mean by reverence for personality 
the sense of the priceless value and inviolable sacredness 
of every person. I mean what Kant meant by his Prac¬ 
tical Imperative: “So act as to treat humanity, whether 
in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case 
as an end withal, never as a means only.” I mean what 
Hegel meant by his summary of the moral law: “Be a 
person, and respect the personality of others.” I mean 
what Royce meant in his contention that an essential 
contempt for the personality of others underlies all moral 
outrages. I mean what Christ meant in his conception of 
every man as a child of God and therefore of priceless 
value and inviolable sacredness to God. 

1 1 am attempting here a somewhat complete treatment of the 
principle of reverence for personality, which has come to seem to 
me a truly supreme principle and which I have briefly discussed 
elsewhere, especially in certain sections of the last two chapters of 
Rational Living, in one section of The Laws of Friendship Human 
and Divine, in sections XXIII-XXV of The Seeming Unreality of 
the Spiritual Life, and in the introductory chapter of The Moral 
and Religious Challenge of Our Times. If the principle is so 
supreme as I have come to believe it to be, it is particularly needed 
for the personal and ethical approach to our whole problem of a 
Christian philosophy of life. 


75 



76 


Seeing Life Whole 

The principle is a supreme principle as giving a basis 
equally for both a true individualism and a true socialism. 
For the principle is one, not two, since respect for per¬ 
sonality involves both basic respect for one’s own person¬ 
ality—self-respect, a true individualism, and respect for 
the personality of others—a true socialism. So far, 
therefore, from being essentially antagonistic, a true 
individualism and a true socialism are inseparable, 
developing together from the beginning, each requiring 
the other and constantly interworking with the other. 
Thus McDougall says: “We find that the idea of the self 
and the self-regarding sentiment are essentially social 
products; that their development is effected by constant 
interplay between personalities, between the self and 
society; that for this reason, the complex conception of 
self thus attained implies constant reference to others and 
to society in general, and is, in fact, not merely a concep¬ 
tion of self, but always of one’s self in relation to other 
selves. This social genesis of the idea of self lies at the 
root of morality.” 2 

That the principle of reverence for personality is a 
supreme ethical principle is implied not only in McDou- 
gall’s account of the development of self-consciousness, but 
also in the position taken by Kant and Hegel and Royce. 
It is likewise reflected in the importance given by ethical 
writers to the development of personality. 3 In his dis¬ 
cussion of happiness as compared with pleasure and joy, 
McDougall makes plain how our whole ethical aim gathers 
about the development of personalities: 

“Happiness arises from the harmonious operation of all 
the sentiments of a well-organized and unified personality, 

3 Social Psychology, p. 180. 

3 Cf. Miss Calkins, The Good Man and the Good, p. 48; Hobhouse 
on “The Principle of Harmony,” in The Rational Good, pp. 138 ff. 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 77 

one in which the principal sentiments support one another in 
a succession of actions all of which tend towards the same 
or closely allied and harmonious ends. Hence the richer, the 
more highly developed, the more completely unified or in¬ 
tegrated is the personality, the more capable is it of sus¬ 
tained happiness in spite of inter-current pains of all 
sorts. ... If this account of happiness is correct, it follows 
that to add to the sum of happiness is not merely to add to 
the sum of pleasures, but is rather to contribute to the de¬ 
velopment of higher forms of personality, personalities 
capable, not merely of pleasure, as the animals are, but, of 
happiness. If this conclusion is sound, it is of no small 
importance to the social sciences; it goes far to reconcile 
the doctrine of such moralists as T. H. Green with that of the 
more enlightened utilitarians; for the one party insists that 
the proper end of moral effort is the development of per¬ 
sonalities, the other that it is the increase of happiness, and 
these we now see to be identical ends.” 4 

The principle of reverence for personality is a supreme 
religious principle also, as suggesting the reasons for the 
way that God takes in his treatment of all men. For the 
principle throws light on many difficult questions in our 
understanding of the providence of God, including the 
seeming unreality of the spiritual life and the constantly 
recurring problem of evil. 

The principle of reverence for personality is also the 
principle that has even unconsciously guided the develop¬ 
ment of history and given the surest test of any given 
stage of civilization. We can test a civilization perhaps 
most surely by its treatment of children and women, just 
because this indicates its intrinsic respect for personality, 
since children and women, as the most defenseless groups, 
cannot compel respect. A delicate sense of the priceless 
value and inviolable sacredness of every person becomes 
thus a supreme test of civilization. 

4 Op. cit., pp. 156-7. 


78 


Seeing Life Whole 


ii 

We shall best see the fundamental nature of the prin¬ 
ciple of reverence for personality by noting that our 
whole constitution looks to personal relations; that in 
mind and body we seem to be made for them. 

On the physical side , man’s long infancy—the most 
remarkable physical difference of man from the lower 
animals—requires for the human child long parental care, 
and therefore what Drummond calls the evolution of a 
mother and the evolution of a father. 5 Man is plainly 
made in this respect for personal relations. This long 
infancy is probably connected with two other momentous 
changes, as John Fiske points out,—with the development 
of man’s greater brain power and with man’s greater 
educability. 6 Man’s capacity, as a tool-using animal, 
for the expression of himself in work, especially in his 
impress on his surroundings, also suggests how truly he is 
made for self-revelation, of a kind hardly open to the 
brute at all, and so for personal relations. The physical 
basis of his capacity for speech—for there plainly is such 
a physical as well as psychical basis for speech—also 
shows that man is made as no other animal, for self-revela¬ 
tion and personal relations. 

On the mental side , the sex and parental instincts and 
the gregarious instinct, to name no others, look directly 
to society and to developing personal relations. Even 
self-consciousness, as we have already seen, is socially 
developed. An engrossing egoism, therefore, is inevitably 
self-defeating. It ultimately arrays all against itself. 
Joy in victory over another, on the other hand, requires 
the recognition that the other is at least nearly as good 

6 Ascent of Man, pp. 267 If. 

8 Destiny of Man, pp. 51 ff. 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 79 

as oneself, for there is no glory in a victory over an essen¬ 
tial inferior. The remarkable effect upon us of the praise 
and blame of others, of their approval and disapproval, 
is another illustration of how surely in the very consti¬ 
tution of our minds we are made, once more, for personal 
relations. Our satisfaction in praise, on the other hand, 
is tempered by the fact that the praiser is necessarily 
recognized as in some sense superior, so that our egoism 
at that point also is checked. From the lowest to the 
highest in human society, too, the law seems to hold that 
we feel the need as human beings of recognition by others. 
English public school boys know no severer punishment to 
visit upon a recalcitrant schoolmate than to do what they 
call “sending him to Coventry”; and to send a boy to 
Coventry is to condemn him to essential isolation—ignor¬ 
ing him absolutely, paying no attention to anything that 
he says or does. And this discipline, it is said, is enough 
soon to bring the hardest to terms. And at the other end 
of the social scale, in Browning’s Instans Tyrannies, the 
old tyrant feels this same imperative need of recognition 
by others, and cannot be satisfied that even the humblest 
and most obscure of his subjects, while he bows his body, 
should not also manifestly bow his will, so he sets his 
“five wits on the stretch to inveigle the wretch.” In all 
these mental characteristics man is plainly made for per¬ 
sonal relations. 

We may well see also that the whole man, in the full 
range of his being, comes out only in personal relations. 
Things call man out but in small part. Only another 
significant personality can arouse our full response. For 
this very reason, probably, persons are for us the most 
certain facts, the most important facts, and the most 
abiding facts of our world. They are, in the first place, 
the most certain facts because we find it practically impos- 


80 


Seeing Life Whole 

sible to deny their existence, although there is no such 
impossibility for our minds in questioning the reality of 
outward things. They are the most important facts be¬ 
cause they give us the highest and most significant re¬ 
lations we know. And they are the most abiding facts, 
if the poets of all times and lands are right in their asser¬ 
tion of the immortality of love. For love can exist only 
in a personal life, and it is not more enduring than the per¬ 
son whose deepest quality it is. In all these ways, then, 
we are made most of all for personal relations; and it 
w T ould seem to follow that the laws of the moral world 
are social laws, the laws of personal relations. It w T ould 
then further follow that the supreme condition of living 
must be the supreme condition of fine personal relations, 
and that supreme condition I believe to be the spirit of 
reverence for personality. We need to trace out its sig¬ 
nificance in some detail. 

Reverence for personality, as we have already seen, in¬ 
cludes both self-respect and respect for others. 

in 

First of all, reverence for personality includes self- 
respect. And by self-respect is meant neither self-conceit 
nor self-exaltation on the one hand nor self-depreciation 
on the other. These depend, rather, on temperament, 
and there are plainly two naturally opposing tem¬ 
peraments here,—one temperament tending strongly 
to self-exaltation, the other with equal strength to self¬ 
depreciation; and both are alike undesirable. But true 
self-respect is the recognition of oneself as a member of 
the whole of society, with one’s own individuality and 
unique contribution to make, side by side with others. 
The street Arab puts the matter not so unphilosophically 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 81 

when he says to his fellow Arab: “You are not the only 
pebble on the beach”; for he recognizes, philosophically 
enough, that the other is a pebble, even as he himself is, 
but he reminds him that he is not the only pebble. Paul’s 
organic view of society underlies a true self-respect: 
“Not to think of himself more highly than he ought to 
think; but so to think as to think soberly, according as 
God hath dealt to each man a measure of faith.” And 
this genuine self-respect is kept from conceit by two great 
considerations: first, by the sense of the large and in¬ 
dispensable contribution which comes to us steadily from 
the other members of society, and our consequent immeas¬ 
urable debt to them; and, second, by our sense of falling 
far short of attaining what must be God’s ideal for our¬ 
selves. Jean Ingelow’s old fisher preacher marked the 
difference between true and false humility: 

The day was, I have been afraid of pride— 

Hard man’s hard pride; but now I am afraid 
Of man’s humility. I counsel you, 

By the great God’s great humbleness, and by 
His pity, be not humble over-much. 7 

% . 

The self-respecting man, then, without either self-con¬ 
ceit or self-depreciation, may believe in his genuine 
significance, that he is “called to an imperishable work 
in the world” and hence must make necessarily great 
“claims on life.” Such self-respect , now, is necessary and 
basic for character , to be what one ought; for influence , 
to count as one can; for happiness , to enjoy what one may, 
—what it is given a true man to enjoy. It is worth while 
to examine the prime importance of self-respect, from this 
threefold point of view. 

First of all, self-respect is necessary for one's oien 
1 Brothers and a Sermon. 



82 


Seeing Life Whole 

character. For the self-respect which we hold to be due 
to ourselves is the only measure we have , in the first place, 
for our understanding of others. For there is just one 
bit of reality in the universe that we can know from within, 
namely, ourselves. And this self of ours becomes for us 
necessarily the key to the universe, especially the key to 
all other personalities. In the second place, self-respect 
is the only measure we have for our interpretation of the 
Golden Rule. For what it means that we should do unto 
others what we would that men should do unto us, evidently 
depends on our own claims on life, on what we believe to be 
due to ourselves. As Lotze says: “When an Indian tortures 
his captured enemy, this is no proof that he is not guided 
by some Idea of right; by so acting he affords the con¬ 
quered man an opportunity of upholding his honour by 
that silent endurance and contempt of pain which seem 
to him the ideal of manly perfection; and he himself, if the 
same unlucky fate should befall him, endures as great suf¬ 
fering with equal fortitude.” 8 If one asks only for food 
and shelter for himself, that will compass his full sense of 
obligation for others. On the contrary, if one asks much 
—a man’s full life in its largest and highest range—then 
that will be the measure of his sense of obligation to other 
men also. 

Whatever, therefore, tends essentially to lessen or 
cheapen our own self-respect affects at once our respect 
for others also. For example, if we have lost faith in our 
own immortality, we may for a time be able to forget the 
sense of intolerable loss in work for others. But the time 
inevitably comes when we must see that others, too, have 
now become only creatures of a day, not “called to an 
imperishable work in the world,” and thus not endowed 
with “the power of an endless life.” McDougall speaks 
8 Microcosmus, Yol. I, p. 707. 



The Personal and Ethical Approach 83 

as a psychologist when he says: “Thus if a man believes 
that he has, or is, a substantial soul that can continue 
to enjoy consciousness after the death of the body, 
that belief is a feature of his total conception of his self 
which may, and of course often does, profoundly influ¬ 
ence his conduct.” 9 That means that we cannot lose our 
own sense of immortality and still keep the same sense of 
the value of others or of the significance of work for 
them. Whatever we may think of immortality, we may 
not rationally ignore this consideration. John Stuart 
Mill is candid enough to admit this influence of the hope of 
immortality. “The beneficial influence of such a hope,” 
Orr 10 quotes him as saying, “is far from trifling. It 
makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the 
feelings, and gives greater strength as well as greater 
solemnity to all the sentiments which are awakened in us 
by our fellow-creatures, and by mankind at large. . . . 
But the benefit consists less in the presence of any specific 
hope than in the enlargement of the general scale of the 
feelings; the loftier aspirations being no longer kept down 
by a sense of the insignificance of human life—by the 
disastrous feeling of ‘not worth while.’ ” Sully, in his 
work on Pessimism , says also: “I would only say that if 
men are to abandon all hope of a future life, the loss, in 
point of cheering and sustaining influence, will be a vast 
one, and one not to be made good, so far as I can see, by 
any new idea of services to collective humanity. 11 All 
kinds of substitutes, therefore, for personal immortality 
seem likely inevitably to lessen the significance of persons 
now in our relations with them; though there are undoubt¬ 
edly considerable temperamental differences between men 

8 Op. cit., p. 182. 

10 The Christian View of Ood in the World, pp. 159-160. 

n Pessimism, p. 317, quoted by Orr, op. cit., p. 72. 



84 Seeing Life Whole 

in their feeling about the significance and value of personal 
immortality. 

But there is still another way in which any cheapening 
of ourselves endangers right relations with others. One 
of the poets expresses the danger: 

The hands that love us often are the hands 

That softly close our eyes and draw us earth-ward. 

We give them all the largess of our life— 

Not this, not all the world, contenteth them. 

Till we renounce our rights as living souls. 

And, as Hugh Black says, “we cannot renounce our rights 
as living souls without losing our souls.” Respect for 
oneself, therefore, as an individual and significant member 
of the whole of human society means that, for the sake 
not only of ourselves but for the sake of all with whom we 
have to do, our first basic, all-inclusive duty is to be true 
to the trust of our own individuality. There is, therefore, 
a point beyond which we must not allow ourselves to go 
in seeming service of others or in seeming sacrifice of 
ourselves to others. Mrs. Browning makes Romney 
Leigh say: 

I have a pattern on my nail, 

And I will carve the world after it. 

> 

So the “exploiter of souls,” to use the deft phrase of one 
of our novelists, has a pattern on his nail, by which he 
feels perfectly competent to judge and direct the lives of 
all about him. We cannot yield to this kind of exploita¬ 
tion, and still keep either our character or our best 
influence. When we have thus yielded to the desecration 
of our own personality, we have done exactly that which 
Christ called casting our pearls before swine. For the 
door is so closed on all the finest personal relations. 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 85 

Self-knowledge, self-reverence, self-control. 

These three alone lead life to sovereign power. 

And self- reverence is basic. 

Self-respect, then, lies everywhere at the base of char¬ 
acter. Whatever lowers self-respect lowers all personal 
relations, 

Self-respect , in the second place, is necessary for one's 
own influence. Ultimately we have only ourselves to give. 
This is our one great contribution, our truest influence, 
our one great trust. The largeness and significance of 
that gift of ourselves depend upon the largeness and sig¬ 
nificance of the self given. We owe, too, in all personal re¬ 
lations, with God or men, a growing self —growing in the 
line of our unique individuality but constantly enriching. 
If, then, we do not value our own individuality, our own 
unique possible contribution, but fall into a mistaken 
imitation of others, we have practically no significant 
contribution to make—nothing worth while to give. For 
if two of us are just alike, one of our philosophers has 
said, one of us can be spared; and plainly it will be the 
imitation, the copy, that can be spared. For even a small 
reality is far more significant than a big sham. The 
infinite variety and complexity of nature insures a field 
for a man’s unique individuality. According to the evolu¬ 
tion point of view, all progress ultimately depends on 
“favorable variations.” In human progress, therefore, 
the individuality of each man, we may believe, constitutes 
each man such a possible “favorable variation”; for he 
has his own unique self to give, and so can render to so¬ 
ciety and the race a service no one else can replace. The 
community, too, if it is to be at its best, needs this free 
initiative on the part of each individuality. Nothing is 
so essential to human progress. This becomes, indeed, 



86 


Seeing Life Whole 

the surest test for the kind of state or community action 
which, in any given case, may be wisely employed. The 
principle, that is, justifies, not every kind of state action, 
but only that kind of state or community action which 
tends to promote the initiative of the individual and helps 
him make his full contribution. On the other hand, it 
counts indubitably unjustified every form of state or 
community action which hinders individual initiative and 
contribution. 12 

The greatest discovery, therefore, that a man ever 
makes, next to his discovery of God—and the two are 
probably essentially synchronous—is the discovery of 
himself , finding himself, finding that particular unique¬ 
ness which is manifested and reflected in his entire per¬ 
sonality; finding his own particular mission and message 
—his calling both to life and to work. Emerson’s warn¬ 
ing against throwing away one’s own honest individuality 
is always needed: “Set ten men to write their journal for 
one day, and nine of them will leave out their thought or 
proper result—that is their net experience—and lose 
themselves in misreporting the supposed experience of 
other people.” But their “net experience” is precisely the 
one great gift which they have to make to men. This 
requires absolute inner honesty—the honesty, as we have 
already seen, of a true witness to the great values of life. 

Once more, self-respect is necessary for one's own hap¬ 
piness. One needs supremely the joy of knowing that he 
has a part, a real, a significant, an unique part, a son’s 
part, to play in life, a part which if he does not play 
simply will not be played. For this fidelity to his own in¬ 
dividuality, as we have seen, constitutes both his own 
largest attainment in character and his highest service 

13 Cf. King, The Moral and Religious Challenge of Our Times, pp. 
75 - 76 . 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 87 

to others, and hence naturally becomes as well the source 
of his highest joy. In The Boy and the Angel , Browning 
tells the story of the great Archangel coming down to 
sing God’s praise in the place of a little boy, and the 
poet represents God as saying, “I miss my little human 
praise.” Not even the great organ note of the Archangel 
could replace in the ear of God the little treble of the boy. 

From this point of view, therefore, each one of us may 
have the assurance and joy of knowing that he has his 
own absolutely unique individuality, his own note, his own 
flavor, his own vision, his own message. This is hardly 
more than the expression of the plain fact of the untold 
complexity of the being of man revealed in evolution and 
in modern psychology. It is not too much to say with 
Hoff ding 13 that individuality is the ultimate miracle of 
history,—an individuality of the entire personality, of 
which the individuality of face and the individuality of 
voice are only quite inadequate illustrations. How marvel¬ 
ous is this fact of individuality, like the unexplained for¬ 
tuitous but essential variations of evolution! The uniquely 
individual person! Only this could be truly and in the high¬ 
est sense a child of God, worthy to be the goal of age-long 
evolution; and only the deep spirit of reverence is sufficient 
to express what we need to recognize in such a personality. 
The complete realization of his individual self—this it is 
which constitutes a man’s high calling in morals and in 
religion, in character, in influence, in happiness. In a 
deeper and more all-inclusive sense probably than Shake¬ 
speare himself saw, is it true, 

This above all; to thine own self be true: 

And it must follow, as the Night the Day, 

Thou canst not then be false to any man. 

“Cf. Outlines of Psychology, p. 353. 


88 


Seeing Life Whole 

And we may not leave this discussion of the significance 
of self-respect without remembering that we are under the 
most solemn obligation to make the full self-respect which 
we claim for ourselves possible to others also. 

But the principle of reverence for personality involves 
not only self-respect but respect for others. And respect 
for others always includes both respect for their liberty 
and respect for the inner sanctity of their person. 

IV 

First, then, it means respect for the liberty of others; 
for that respect is necessary and basic for character, for 
influence, and for happiness. 

In the first place, respect for the liberty of others is 
necessary for one's own character. One becomes a slave 
who treats another as a slave, as Fichte long ago pointed 
out. And Booker Washington was only giving us a 
modern version of this same proverb when he said that 
you cannot hold another man in the ditch without staying 
in the ditch yourself. Character inevitably deteriorates 
through the use of arbitrary power. And this holds true 
whether the arbitrary power is sought by one man or 
another, by labor or by capital, by one nation or another, 
by one race or another. For we all need, if we are to 
build solidly in the matter of character, a deep sense of 
accountability, and we should consequently neither desire 
nor accept the place of arbitrary power. For it makes 
right moral conditions and fine personal relations impos¬ 
sible, whatever else is done or not done. For arbitrariness 
has no rational place for true freedom on the part of any 
man. Even the “ benevolent tyrant” necessarily defeats 
his own aim, in whatever held he works. So long as he 
takes the tyrant’s attitude he can only give things and 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 89 

physical conditions; he cannot give fine personal condi¬ 
tions. So long, then, as he keeps his arbitrariness he can¬ 
not give the highest conditions of happiness; for these 
conditions are inner, not outer, and involve, at the very 
least, respect for the liberty of the other man. And that 
means that such continued disregard of inner conditions, 
of the moral liberty of the other man, disintegrates one’s 
own character. 

And respect for the liberty of another is necessary also 
for one y s own influence. The highest influence is to win 
another man to his own choice of character or of the right 
course of action. But you cannot win another to char¬ 
acter without enlisting his will, not breaking it. Respect 
for his liberty is here, therefore, plainly basic to your own 
influence. It is possible to tie a boy disastrously to his 
mother’s apron strings, as the phrase goes. For the boy 
must have some opportunity for using his will if he is to 
learn to use it wisely. It is not too much to say that 
every human being, including the child, has an inalienable 
right to make his own blunders. It is far better that 
one’s daughter should occasionally wear a ribbon that 
does not harmonize with the rest of her apparel, rather 
than that she should never have the opportunity to use her 
own judgment at all. There are weak-willed children 
often, not because their inheritance is not good, but simply 
because they have not had a chance to use their own wills. 
Military obedience by children cannot, then, be the aim 
on the part of either parents or teachers. It is no sim¬ 
ple victory in the “conflict of wills” which the righteous 
parent or teacher seeks. No real obedience or true char¬ 
acter can be so obtained. And that means that the man 
is himself exerting no true influence. For true influence 
involves enlisting the will, calling it out, training it in the 
direction of its own best, and all this is an unobtrusive way 


90 


Seeing Life Whole 

that sacredly respects the liberty of the child and increas¬ 
ingly throws decisions upon the child as he grows. Fair- 
bairn has put in classic form the growth of unobtrusive¬ 
ness in the relations of a true father to his growing son. 
For the true father knows that influence is not dom¬ 
ination. For “in whatever form,” as Fairbairn says, “the 
sovereignty of a father who has been a father indeed, is 
of all human authorities the most real and the most en¬ 
during.” 14 

Respect for the liberty of the child, therefore, does not 
necessarily mean that in the relation of parent and child 
there is no place for authority, for law, even for physical 
punishment, for some form of what may be called “police 
action.” There is such a place, as McDougall says: “It 
is generally necessary that law shall be enforced at first 
by physical strength, and that his (the child’s) regard for 
it shall be encouraged by physical punishment; for the 
first step towards moral conduct is the control of the im¬ 
mediate impulse, and fear of punishment can secure this 
control of the immediate impulse.” 15 But we are not to 
mistake the result of all this for real moral character. It 
is at the most only a bare beginning in true moral devel¬ 
opment. 

Perhaps no one has put more significantly or sugges¬ 
tively the central aim and means in this whole relation of 
parent and child than Patterson Du Bois in his definition 
of the true father , when he insists that the true father does 
not say, “I will conquer that child, no matter what it may 
cost him,” but, “I will help that child to conquer himself, 
no matter what it may cost me. . . . Parent and child 
are to meet in a joint effort on the part of both to do 
God’s right, and not on the part of either for mere supe- 

14 The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, pp. 434-435. 

15 Op. cit., p. 187. 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 91 

riority or mastery. The only principle that works under 
all conditions is, not the principle of arbitrary parental 
mastery, but of parental aid and service. This is our 
Father’s way of dealing with his children. He threatens 
no compulsion, but throws the responsibility on them by 
giving them a right of choice.” Let it be clear that this 
is no cheap and easy and sentimental way; it rather alone 
faces all the facts. It respects the child’s liberty and 
seeks his real character. And it exerts the highest in¬ 
fluence because it is reverent of the liberty of the child, 
and is no domination. 

We have discussed this principle, of the necessary 
respect for the liberty of others, chiefly as illustrated in 
the relation of parent and child, but the principle holds, 
it should be remembered, in all personal relations , and 
even more when we seek influence over adults. For to 
fail sacredly and persistently to respect the liberty of 
others in any of the associations of life, to fail to give 
them full room for the exercise of their moral freedom, is 
ultimately to abjure moral means altogether and to fall 
back directly upon force. No association or situation 
between individuals or groups or classes or nations or 
races can be finally satisfactory into which men do not 
come freely with self-respect and with respect for the free¬ 
dom of others; in which rational sympathetic persuasion 
and unconscious contagion of character have not prac¬ 
tically replaced force of all kinds. 

Naturally masterful personalities have need to be pecu¬ 
liarly on their guard at this point in their relation to 
others; for in spite of themselves and even in spite of their 
own principles and desires, they are likely by sheer force 
and weight of personality to determine what the relation 
to others is to be, to dominate the situation, and to sub¬ 
stitute this forceful domination for genuine influence. 


92 


Seeing Life Whole 

With full honesty of intention they have still become quite 
unconsciously benevolent tyrants. 

We need to consider here, too, the two great tempera¬ 
mental types into which humanity divides, and see their 
respective dangers: the stable type and the unstable 
type. 16 The danger of the stable type is that of simple 
domination, without regard to the particular situation and 
without any real insight into it, in the place of genuine in¬ 
fluence. And this hinders progress, because it tends to 
prevent new suggestions from arising. The danger of the 
unstable type, on the other hand, is that it shall have no 
influence because it is too changeable. It has no con¬ 
sistent leadership that can be followed, and so in its 
turn hinders progress too. The contrast is very like that 
of which James speaks 17 when he says: “Life is one long 
struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of 
conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by 
our instinctive perception of them as individual facts. 

. . . Sometimes the abstract conceiver’s way is better, 
sometimes that of the man of instinct.” 

Respect for the liberty of the other is also necessary 
both for your own and for the other's happiness. 

It is necessary, in the first place, for your own happi¬ 
ness; for respect for the liberty of others evidently avoids 
the friction of forced situations, and gives positively finer 
personal relations, and so truly helps to your own 
happiness. The simple fact, too, that the situation 
is what it ought to be gives to the man who wants the 
best a sincere pleasure. No personal relations can bring 
their best, in joy and enrichment of life, that do not fulfil 
these ethical conditions. 

Respect for the liberty of others is not less necessary 

10 Cf. Outline of Science, Yol. II, pp. 553-4. 

17 Psychology, Yol. II, p. 674. 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 93 

for their happiness. For to make another fully happy 
it is necessary that he should have some sphere of action 
of his own, some chance for choice and decision—some 
range, however small, for accomplishment that is genuinely 
his own, of which he can say, “That, under God, is my 
work.” Of that room for liberty you have no right to 
deprive him, and you cannot make him happy without it. 
I he head of any enterprise with a large staff, particularly 
if he is himself naturally a masterful personality, is in 
danger unconsciously of practically coming in and taking 
on, from time to time, the work of another; and that is a 
very serious breach of the fundamental rights of the sub¬ 
ordinate. 

This centrally important condition of happiness 
through sacred respect for the liberty of others is often 
overlooked. No possible combination of things and ar¬ 
rangements and physical advantages can take the place 
of this respect for another’s liberty. With reference to 
all such mechanical adjustments, employees, for example, 
are pretty certain to feel, if not to say, “I can get on 
without these things, or provide them for myself, but what 
I want is not these things, not these convenient arrange¬ 
ments, but recognition as a personal willing factor in the 
whole enterprise, freely contributing my own best to the 
result and so in some real sense a personal partner whose 
will is respected.” There are, therefore, few executive 
principles better worth faithfully following than to find 
the best human beings one can, and then to give them 
room. For that will mean, in the first place, deepened 
self-respect on the part of the employees, and an added 
sense of the value of their work. Both these factors will 
carry with them a distinctly greater happiness in the 
work undertaken, and consequently tend to increase the 
quantity of the work done, and improve its quality. 


94 


Seeing Life Whole 


v 

But respect for the personality of others involves not 
only respect for the liberty of others, but a sacred rev¬ 
erence for the sanctity of the other’s inner personality. 

And that sacred reverence for the sanctity of the other’s 
inner personality is necessary and basic, first of all, for 
one’s own character. One falls inevitably below his own 
best, even in the closest relations, or with his youngest 
child or his least mature pupil, or in the difficult rela¬ 
tions of groups and classes, when he forgets that in the 
case of every person there is an inner sanctuary into 
which he may come only by the other’s permission. There is 
a certain solitariness of the human soul , which is scarcely 
ever fully recognized. What an infinitesimal fraction 
of one’s whole experience is ever known even by those with 
whom one is most intimately acquainted! How little 
either of the best or of the worst in us is or can be revealed 
to another! It is not strange, when this sense of soli¬ 
tariness and of the impossibility of being fully under¬ 
stood by another sweeps over us, that we are driven back 
to God. We learn to be deeply grateful for a sense of 
the presence and knowledge of God, such as awed and 
almost terrified us in our earlier years, and we say now 
with the ancient Psalmist, and with a new note of profound 
thankfulness: 

O Jehovah, thou hast searched me, and known me. 

Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising; 

Thou understandest my thought afar off. 

Thou searchest out my path and my lying down. 

And art acquainted with all my ways. 

For there is not a word in my tongue, 

But, lo, O Jehovah, thou knowest it altogether. 

Thou hast beset me behind and before, 

And laid thy hand upon me. 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 95 

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; 

It is high_, I cannot attain unto it. 

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? 18 

One can hardly take in this large measure of the solitari¬ 
ness of the human soul even at the best, and fail to get at 
the same time some feeling of the “Holy of Holies” in 
the personality of another. For the one holy thing that 
the universe contains is a person, and when one sees this 
sacred significance of the person he instinctively knows 
that in the presence of this “Holy of Holies” he needs to 
take off his shoes and to uncover his head. 

At the same time, we may be grateful that “this myster¬ 
ious isolation of self from self ’’ is not quite so absolute as 
we are likely to take it, and that there is a very real and 
significant way, which Hocking has pointed out, in which 
we may deeply share in each other’s lives: 

“I have sometimes sat looking at a comrade, speculating on 
this mysterious isolation of self from self. Why are we so 
made that I gaze and see of thee only thy Wall, and never 
Thee? This Wall of thee is but a movable part of the Wall 
of my world; and I also am a Wall to thee: we look out at 
one another from behind masks. How would it seem if my 
mind could but once be within thine; and we could meet and 
without barrier be with each other? And then it has fallen 
upon me like a shock—as when one thinking himself alone 
has felt a presence— But I am in thy soul. These things 
around me are in thy experience. They are thy own; when I 
touch them and move them I change thee. When I look on 
them I see what thou seest; when I listen, I hear what thou 
hearest. I am in the great Room of thy soul; and I experience 
thy very experience. For where art thou? Not there, behind 
those eyes, within that head, in darkness, fraternizing with 
chemical processes. Of these, in my own case, I know noth- 


18 Psalm 139:1-7. 


96 


Seeing Life Whole 

ing, and will know nothing; for my existence is spent not 
behind my Wall, but in front of it. I am there, where I 
have treasures. And there art thou, also. This world in 
which I live, is the world of thy soul: and being within 
that, I am within thee. I can imagine no contact more real 
and thrilling than this; that we should meet and share iden¬ 
tity, not through ineffable inner depths (alone), but here 
through the foregrounds of common experience; and that 
thou shouldst be—not behind that mask—but here, pressing 
with all thy consciousness upon me, containing me, and these 
things of mine.” 19 

This conception of a great common fellowship with 
others in our experience of a common world enlarges and 
enriches our whole thought of the personal relations in 
which we stand. 

And respect for the sanctity of the inner person of 
another is necessary to our own character also, because we 
are in danger of measuring too often the intimacy of our 
friendships by the number of privacies which w r e feel at 
liberty to ride over roughshod. Oliver Wendell Holmes 
reminds us that it is those who, because of long acquaint¬ 
ance, have the key to the side door of our hearts, who are 
most likely to invade the sanctities of our being. “Be very 
careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side 
door,” he says. “The fact of possessing one renders 
those even who are dear to you very terrible at times. 
. . . Some of them have a scale of your whole nervous 
system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in 
semitones,—touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist 
strikes his instrument. ... No stranger can get a great 
manv notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes 
one that knows it well.” 20 Confucius is reported as say- 

19 The Meaning of God in Human Experience, pp. 265-6. 

20 Quoted by H. Clay Trumbull in Friendship the Master Passion, 
p. 91. 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 97 

ing of another, that he “knows the art of associating with 
his friends: however old the acquaintance may be, he 
always treats them with the same respect.” 21 And it 
should be remembered that we are in peculiar danger 
of overriding the finer spirits. The ruder and the brusker 
may be able to defend themselves, but those of finer mold 
are more easily crushed. It was a new sense of the sacred¬ 
ness of intimate relations which a young man of my ac¬ 
quaintance got when, as a boy, he heard an older man 
in a chance remark say to another: “I never go into my 
wife’s room without knocking.” It was not that this need 
necessarily be an absolute rule, but the remark suggested 
to the boy what had not before dawned on him—the pos¬ 
sibility of a sacred reverence for another, in even the most 
intimate conceivable relations. 

On the other hand, the worst and most damning of all 
sins is the spirit of contempt for the person of another. 
Bishop Brent gives an illustration of this attitude: “The 
mistress of a household on coming downstairs one morn¬ 
ing was greeted by her maid, who was dusting in the hall, 

with a ‘Good morning,’ and, ‘Do you know, Mrs. Z-, 

that I have been with you five years today?’ ‘Have you?’ 
was the response. ‘You have left some dust on that chair.’ 
The mistress boasted doubtless that she had ‘reminded 
her servant of her place.’ No further comment is needed. 
The maid thought herself to be a person, but was reminded 
that she was a thing”— 22 an animated dustrag. Such 
contempt for the inner life of another suggests how 
deeply one’s own character may suffer by willingness to 
use another merely as a convenience. 

Fine high-minded personal relations do not come by 
accident. The door, we do well to remember, in all such 

21 Sayings of Confucius, p. 74. 

23 With God in the World, p. 65. 




98 


Seeing Life Whole 

relations, is always opened from within. One stands with¬ 
out and knocks. He may not force the door. So God him¬ 
self reveres our human personalities. For even the Christ 
is represented as standing at the door of the human heart 
and knocking, that he may enter. “Behold,” saith he, 
“I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my 
voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup 
with him, and he with me.” 23 But he must open the door. 
Even the Christ stands without and knocks. 

One cannot fail, then, in this finer observance of rever¬ 
ence for others, and not fail in his own highest char¬ 
acter. 

And this reverence for the sanctity of the inner person¬ 
ality of others is necessary also for one's own influence. 

If one is to influence others toward the highest in char¬ 
acter, one must himself show this highest. We cannot 
much help to bring our children, our pupils, our friends 
to a fine sense of the reverence due to the inner sanctity of 
the person of another—the finest flower of character— 
without revealing a like reverence ourselves. Our example 
goes farther than our words. Nowhere more than here is 
it emphatically true that “what you are speaks so loudly 
I cannot hear what you say.” We can hardly be too sen¬ 
sitive to what is due to another person at just this point. 
I once sat at a table with a university president who pro¬ 
ceeded, in my presence, to take pretty severely to task his 
two grown children, who sat at table with us. He seemed 
quite oblivious to the fact that he was inevitably seriously 
breaking down their own self-respect. What he had to 
say to them ought never to have been said in the presence 
of a third person, and especially in the presence of one who 
was a stranger to them. One of my pupils in psychol¬ 
ogy? years ago, in reporting on some childhood experi- 
23 Revelation, 3:20. 



The Personal and Ethical Approach 99 

ences, said that she had never been able to get over the half 
sense of outrage which she had as a very little girl, when 
her mother took the key to a doll’s chest of drawers which 
had been given to her, and proceeded to go through the 
drawers without her permission. There was nothing in 
the drawers that her mother might not well enough have 
seen, but the daughter felt, young as she was, that the 
chest of drawers had been given to her, and that her 
mother ought to have asked her permission before she went 
through them. And it is difficult not to believe that the 
daughter’s instinct in this was right and the mother’s 
wrong. 

And we need especially, in considering this principle 
of reverence for the inner sanctity of the person, to 
bear clearly in mind that influence is one thing, and 
domination quite another. The stronger a man’s per¬ 
sonality, the more he ought to take this distinction to 
heart. One of my acquaintances, years ago, said to 
me concerning a student, “He is one of your disciples.” 
I do not remember what I said; it is not important; but if 
I had expressed my full mind, in answer to the remark 
made, I should have said something like this : “I want you 
to understand that, in the sense in which you use the word 
‘disciple,’ I have no disciples and wish to have none. I 
want no pupil of mine, if he looks back to his association 
with me, to have to say, ‘That man took advantage of my 
youth and ignorance and inexperience to stamp himself 
upon me,’ instead of being able to say, ‘He helped me to be 
true to my own absolute best.’ ” The last is influence, 
which any man may eagerly covet; the other attitude is 
domination, which no man should be willing to exercise. 
And this principle, too, it should be remembered, holds for 
groups, for classes, and for nations and races as well as 
for individuals. Nothing is more needed in the very 


100 


Seeing Life Whole 

difficult Negro question here in America than this deeper 
reverence for personality, on every side. 24 

And once more, reverence for the sanctity of the inner 
personality of another is necessary for the happiness both 
of yourself and of the other. 

It is necessary, first of all, for your own happiness. 
For without such reverence you cannot know the finest, 
most beautiful, and most rewarding personal relations, 
which alone can constitute happiness of the highest order. 

And such reverence is needed not less for the happiness 
of others. For without such reverence you keep others 
from finding rewarding relations with yourself and with 
others as well, so far as they are affected by you. Some 
very honest attempts to increase the happiness of others 
thus fail egregiously, just because of that “certain blind¬ 
ness in human beings,” of which James wrote, “the blind¬ 
ness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the 
feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.” 
And he draws this counsel from his study—a counsel, it 
will be noted, to be deeply considerate of the personality 
of others: 

“And now what is the result of all these considerations 
and quotations ? It is negative in one sense, but positive in 
another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pro¬ 
nouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other 
than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and 
indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy 
in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. 
Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good 
is revealed to any single observer, although each observer 
gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position 
in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their 
special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that 

24 See King, The Moral and Religious Challenge of Our Times, 
Chap. VIII. 



The Personal and Ethical Approach 101 

he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the 
most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the 
rest of the vast field.” 25 

There are many mechanically smooth-running house¬ 
holds, it is to be feared, that are so because the rest of the 
family have finally yielded to a domestic tyrant, who 
knows what the others need, and who is inclined to think, 
if not to say, that if they are to be happy at all they must 
be happy in the tyrant’s way. There are many such 
benevolent tyrants, who have a plan for the lives of all 
others with whom they come in contact, and w 7 ho insist 
on making others happy in their owrn fashion, but wdio 
have never made the really great sacrifice of giving up 
their own w r ay. One sometimes feels that he would like to 
w r rite on the fibres of the heart of some of these benevolent 
tyrants (although that w r ould probably not be respectful 
of their personality) Charlotte Yonge’s deep-going 
aphorism: “It is a great thing to sacrifice; but it is a 
greater to consent not to sacrifice in one’s own way.” 

This principle of reverence for personality is the high¬ 
est test and standard for all friendships. And it is some 
such test of high friendship as this which Emerson had in 
mind, in one of the best things that he ever said about 
friends: “Our chief w 7 ant in life is somebody who shall 
make us do what w r e can. This is the service of a friend. 
With him we are easily great. There is a sublime attrac¬ 
tion in him to whatever virtue is in us. How he flings w T ide 
the doors of existence.” 26 There is a beautiful story of 
Baron Bunsen, that, as he lay dying and looked up into the 
face of his wfife as she bowled over him, he said to her, “In 
thy face I have seen the face of the Eternal.” There is 

25 Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of 
Life’s Ideals, pp. 263-4. 

20 Considerations by the Way. 


102 


Seeing Life Whole 

suggestion here of the finest personal relations, of what 
our friends at their best may be to us—media for the reve¬ 
lation even of the divine; so that we could honestly say to 
a true friend, “Since I knew you it has been easier to 
believe in truth and honor and purity; it has been easier 
to believe in the world of the spirit; in thy face I have 
caught glimpses at least of the Eternal.” 

But in Christ alone shall we find the most perfect 
example of this deep sense of reverence for personality. 
As I have elsewhere said, 27 the incident, in John’s Gospel, 
of the woman taken in adultery, in which it is said of 
Jesus, that he “stooped down and with his finger wrote on 
the ground,” illustrates, in a single case, the response of 
Jesus to this basic and eternal principle of reverence for 
the person. For it is hardly possible to misinterpret this 
action of Jesus, as he thus stoops down and writes upon 
the ground. Any one who has ever felt the intolerable 
sense of shame that arises when he has been made an 
unwilling spectator of the needless public humiliation and 
breaking down of the self-respect of a servant, a child, a 
wife, or a fellow man, will know what the feeling of Jesus 
must have been. He would not share, though unwillingly, 
in the cruel, brutal, needless humiliation of even a sinful 
woman by adding to her load of shame so much as the 
weight of his pitying look. She is no thing that she 
should be thus bandied about of men, but a person, herself 
made in the image of the Eternal God. He could not bear 
that the sanctities of her inner person should be thus 
brutally laid open to the brazen gaze of men, though she 
be an open sinner. And the conduct here ascribed to 
Jesus in this interpolated incident in the Gospel of John 
■—the present position of which no critic defends, but the 
inimitable truth of which none denies—is characteristic 
aT The Moral and Religious Challenge of Our Times, pp. 3-5. 


The Personal and Ethical Approach 103 

of his attitude throughout his ministry. Jesus seems 
constantly to be standing, with a kind of moral shudder, 
between the spirit of contempt in the Pharisees and 
Sadducees, and the outraged personality of the common 
people, even of the publicans and sinners; he feels the 
contempt, even for these least, as a blow in his own face. 

The principle of reverence for personality, then, we may 
well believe, as was suggested at the beginning, is a 
supreme guiding principle both in ethics and in religion— 
supreme in all the finer and deeper problems of our living. 
It is in very truth a great way to life, and it has a great 
gift to make to our own troublous times, and particularly 
to a present-day Christian philosophy of life. 


CHAPTER V 


THE PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH 

I 

In turning to the philosophical approach to our prob¬ 
lem of a Christian philosophy of life, we must recognize 
the extent of the field, and see that we can only deal with 
it suggestively, with the utmost brevity. I am to try to 
indicate some articles in my philosophical creed, especially 
as bearing upon religious thinking and living, and as help¬ 
ing to that wholeness in the vision of life which we have 
been making our guiding thought. 

There is a present tendency in some quarters to under¬ 
rate if not to despise philosophy because of the triumphs 
of empirical science. The philosophers, to be sure, must 
be most willing to accept new light from every quarter, 
and be keen in criticism of their own methods. But 
Professor Robinson’s general position in his The Mind in 
the Making seems to me only weakened by his contemptu¬ 
ous view of philosophy: “Nowadays metaphysics is re¬ 
vered by some as our noblest effort to reach the highest 
truth, and scorned by others as the silliest of wild-goose 
chases. I am inclined to rate it, like smoking, as a highly 
gratifying indulgence to those who like it, and, as indul¬ 
gences go, relatively innocent.” 1 The inescapable and 
deep-going questions of ultimate reality, origin and des¬ 
tiny, and of meaning and value are not so easily disposed 

*P. 102. 

104 


\ 


The Philosophical Approach 105 

'of. The view is redolent of the unscientific procedure of 
cutting short the facts to suit one’s theory. The world 
is less simple than this denial of philosophy would suggest. 
We need the best thinking of inquirers in all fields. For 
while it is clear that we must use the scientific method to 
the farthest possible extent, it would still seem ill-advised 
and vain to attempt to eliminate all the questions with 
which men have been engrossed through the centuries 
under the name of philosophy,—especially the deep reli¬ 
gious questions. 

For men are driven by their own natures from infancy 
to try to think the world into unity in various kinds of 
terms. Both the problems of science and the problems of 
philosophy are included in this ideal. Natural science is 
concerned, as we have seen, with the simplest of these 
problems—the problem of trying to think the world into 
unity in mathematico-mechanical terms, and its large 
measure of success is an encouragement to expect increas¬ 
ing success in the other much more difficult problems. 
For, as James says: 

“Though nature’s materials lend themselves slowly and dis- 
couragingly to our translation of them into ethical forms, but 
more readily into aesthetic forms; to translation into scientific 
forms they lend themselves with relative ease and complete¬ 
ness. The translation, it is true, will probably never be 
ended. The perceptive order does not give way, nor the 
right conceptive substitute for it arise, at our bare word of 
command. It is often a deadly fight. . . . But victory 

after victory makes us sure that the essential doom of our 
enemy is defeat.” 2 

And one of these aims, which the mind sets itself—the 
scientific aim—cannot rationally scout the other aims— 
esthetic, ethical and religious—equally well grounded in 


2 Psychology, Yol. II, p. 640. 





106 


Seeing Life Whole 

human nature. Moreover, the triumphs of science, as we 
have seen, are due to severe self-limitation, to confining 
itself to questions of process, of mechanical explanation. 
This should not at all imply, however, the unimportance of 
the philosophical questions of meaning, of ideal interpre¬ 
tation; though the two sets of questions should not be 
confused. 

In taking up, then, some of these articles of my philo¬ 
sophical creed, I am simply trying to share my own best 
vision at this point; those simplifying and unifying lines 
of thought that I have myself found most helpful; the 
series of insights and principles which have seemed most 
illuminating and to which I find myself returning again 
and again; such points as one under the experience of life 
has learned to sift out as most significant. Such working 
principles constitute a kind of practical confession of 
philosophical faith,—the insights, convictions, enthusi¬ 
asms, indignations, ideals, hopes and decisions that have 
grown up out of life’s experience. Such an attempt must 
be a matter of faith on my part that what means much to 
me is likely to mean something, at least, to others. And 
what such testimony will mean to another man he himself 
can hardly tell at the time. How significant any particu¬ 
lar insight will prove only future experience can show. 

n 

First of all, to see the significance of the whole philo¬ 
sophical viewpoint, it may be worth while to bring 
together a number of more or less untechnical definitions 
of the sphere of philosophy , which may help us to see what 
men have been feeling after in this whole realm. 

Dante touches on the spirit of philosophy when he says: 
“To live lovingly with truth is philosophy.” A spirit of 


The Philosophical Approach 107 

loving loyalty to the best one finds, and a belief in the 
unity of truth, are here made the key thoughts. 

And it may be suggested that the spirit of Sophocles, 
as we saw that Matthew Arnold characterized it, “to see 
life steadily and to see it whole,” suggests another un- 
technical definition of philosophy; and implies at least 
two things: taking into account all the facts, not merely 
those of process, and applying the test of the whole 
man. 

Glover develops a similar thought of Plato: “A man 
who is to make anything of life, who means to capture the 
truth of things, must be, so Plato tells us, the ‘ spectator 
of all time and all existence ’—‘ever longing after the whole 
of things in its entirety, divine and human. 5 In a universe 
which has a real unity about it, half-views will not do. 
We have to practise ourselves to get out of the habit of 
the half and be resolute to live in the whole, the good, the 
beautiful.” 3 

James gives his conception of the relation of philosophy 
to the special sciences when he says: “All these special 
sciences, marked off for convenience from the remaining 
body of truth, must hold their assumptions and results 
subject to revision in the light of each other’s needs. The 
forum where they hold discussion is called metaphysics. 
Metaphysics means only an unusually obstinate attempt 
to think clearly and consistently . . . and as soon as 
one’s purpose is the attainment of the maximum possible 
insight into the world as a whole, the metaphysical 
puzzles become the most urgent ones of all.” 4 

To like effect Jevons says the difference between 
philosophy and science is this: “Each science deals with 
one particular set of facts, and no one science deals with 

8 The Pilgrim, p. 61. 

4 Psychology, Briefer Course, pp. 461-2. 


108 


Seeing Life Whole 

all the facts of experience, whereas it is with all the facts 
and with experience as a whole that philosophy deals; for 
the object and purpose of philosophy is to inquire, What 
does all our experience come to—what is the meaning of 
it all?” 5 Eucken’s point of view is quite similar, and he 
suggests that the test of any philosophy must finally lie 
in the fact that it can give 'permanent meaning and value 
to life. 

Kant attempts to cover the field of philosophy by the 
three questions: What can I know? What ought I to 
do? For what may I hope? and puts the questions of 
religion under the last head. And philosophy has inevi¬ 
tably to face the questions of religion as a part of the 
whole question of the meaning of the world, and of the 
possibility of its ideal interpretation. 

Hoff ding says: “The innermost core of all religion is 
faith in the persistence of value in the world.” Or, as he 
elsewhere calls it, “ belief in the conservation of value/ 9 
where he is thinking of the analogy with the physical 
principle of conservation of energy. 

From the Christian point of view Streeter would carry 
Hoff ding’s conception farther, when he says: “Christian¬ 
ity is more than a belief in the Conservation of Value; it 
is above all the belief in the Augmentation of Value. It 
is a belief that the whole creation will ultimately be re¬ 
deemed, that the Golden Age is to be looked for not in the 
past but in the future, and that whenever any good thing 
seems to perish there will appear to take its place, not 
merely an equivalent good but some far better thing.” 6 

The full scope of philosophy is indicated by its divi¬ 
sions. Philosophy is commonly divided into metaphysics,, 
or theory of being, the theory of knowledge,, esthetics * 

6 Philosophy: What Is It? pp. 31-2. 

0 Concerning Prayer, p. 6. 



The Philosophical Approach 109 

ethics, and philosophy of religion. And metaphysics, as 
giving the theory of being, is made to include rational 
cosmology, rational psychology, and rational theology, 
dealing with the ultimate questions which lie back of the 
being of the world, of man, and of God. Empirical science 
has a direct and absolutely indispensable contribution of 
facts to make to every one of these divisions of philosophy. 
But after the scientific method has done its utmost, there 
will still remain the questions of the meaning of experience 
as a whole, including the ultimate questions of origin and 
destiny. 

From his own point of view Dewey thus incidentally 
defines philosophy: “Philosophy starts from some deep 
and wide way of responding to the difficulties life presents, 
but it grows only when material is at hand for making this 
practical response conscious, articulate, and communi¬ 
cable.” 7 All that Dewey here suggests certainly philos¬ 
ophy must include, and there is undoubted need of Dewey’s 
general emphatic insistence on the scientific factor in 
philosophy. The only question to be raised is, whether 
his definition does not exclude much that cannot be wisely 
ignored, and especially whether the place made for religion 
and particularly for the Christianity of Christ is not 
singularly bare and inadequate. 8 

Now, one can hardly den}^ that these definitions of the 
sphere of philosophy suggest a •worthy and permanent 
task , which men cannot escape, and which has incalculable 
and permanent interest for men. Religion, certainly, has 
no quarrel with the broad task of philosophy here sug¬ 
gested, and it is worth remembering that w T e can none of 
us help having some kind of view on these age-long 
philosophical problems. The only question seems to be 

7 Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 53„ 

3 Ibid., pp. 210-212* 


110 Seeing Life Whole 

whether our views shall be well thought out and soundly 
based or not. 


iii 

In passing from the definitions of the sphere of 
philosophy to fundamental philosophic points of view , the 
philosophical emphasis on the meaning of experience as a 
whole brings us naturally first of all to the importance of 
what may be called the organic view of truth, where truth 
is conceived not as a closed system but as an evolving 
organic whole. 

1. Various considerations lead to emphasis upon this 
organic view of truth. 

For it is to be noted, in the first place, that truth comes 
not by men keeping silent concerning the convictions which 
have been gradually wrought in them by experience, but 
by bearing honest testimony to the truth so far as they 
have seen it, in the firm belief that what truth needs is 
simply a fair and open field, and that in such a field the 
partialness of the view of one man will be supplemented 
and corrected by the insights of others. 

This is the essence of the Socratic method , which is not 
a mere pedagogic device to bring minds to foreordained 
conclusions, but a method of inquiry, whose success de¬ 
pends on each man’s bearing his honest testimony to the 
truth as he sees it. It assumes that the whole truth is not 
in a man but in all men, and, so far as it is in a single man, 
is above all in his whole personality, not in some fragment 
of it. 

This organic view of truth also emphasizes, it will be 
noticed, the fellowship and cooperation in experiment and 
research of the scientific method , as we have already seen 
it. It recognizes the imperativeness of welcoming truth 


The Philosophical Approach 111 

from every quarter; that truth cannot come from conceit 
on one’s own part, or from depreciation of the value which 
another brings. And in this organic view of the truth 
there is not only this emphasis on fellowship and coopera¬ 
tion, but also, as we have seen, the necessity of the honest 
reaction of each one on the problem faced, the determina¬ 
tion of each to see the new as new, and in this again to 
find one’s limitations corrected by others. 

Society needs at every step the full and free initiative 
of the individual, the possibility for each to make his 
completest contribution to the life of the whole. The 
social consciousness, with its threefold conviction of the 
essential likeness of men, of the inevitable mutual influence 
of men, and of the priceless value and inviolable sacredness 
of every person, fits, it will be seen, right into this organic 
view of the truth; for the pursuit of the organic view of 
the truth is in itself an essentially social process. 

The organic view of the truth calls, thus, for that 
fundamental tolerance which Kidd believes is absolutely 
basic in the progress of western civilization. But it is a 
tolerance that has convictions and is in earnest in pursuit 
of the truth, not an empty indifference and not lack of 
discrimination. It concerns us, therefore, to take the 
organic view of truth in all our philosophy. 

2. We turn naturally next to the tests of truth or 
reality. 

If we are to do any thinking at all, we must assume 
that we can think. That is, we must assume, on the one 
hand, that we can trust our faculties at least to some 
degree, and, on the other hand, can believe that the world 
is a place where thinking can be done, where it is at least 
possible. This is a basic assumption and may be said to 
be the major premise of all our thinking of every kind, 


112 


Seeing Life Whole 

whether scientific or philosophical, whether holding to one 
or another theory of the universe. Lotze states the whole 
position in thoroughgoing fashion: 

“Our thoughts receive the stamp of certainty by being re¬ 
duced to either the already proved certainty of others, or to 
that of immediate truths which neither need nor are sus¬ 
ceptible of proof. The trust which we repose on the one 
hand in the laws of thought by means of which this reduction 
is accomplished, and on the other hand in the simple and 
immediate cognitions to which this leads us, may be guarded 
by repeated and careful proof from the influence of preju¬ 
dices of which the persuasive force is accidental and evanes¬ 
cent; but on the other hand no proof can guard against a 
doubt which suspects of possible error that which men have 
always found to be a necessity of thought. A scepticism that 
does not demonstrate from individual contradictions which 
may be cited the erroneousness of specified prejudices, and 
hence the possibility of correcting them, but goes on cause¬ 
lessly repeating the simple question whether in the end every¬ 
thing is not really quite different from that which we neces¬ 
sarily think it to be, would, in banishing certainty wholly 
from the world, also destroy all the worth of reality. That, 
however, this cannot be—that the world cannot he a mere 
meaningless absurdity —is a moral conviction, which is the 
ultimate ground of our belief in our capacity of cognising the 
truth, and in the general possibility of scientific knowledge. 
But this conviction does not define the extent of such 
knowledge.” 9 

This is assuming or making our major premise the unity 
of truth, that truth cannot contradict itself, and that we 
may rest in that conviction. It is also assuming that the 
world is a rational world in two great senses: as meeting 
the test of logical consistency on the one hand, and the 
test of worth on the other. 10 As a whole it is not too 
much to say that a faith essentially religious logically 

9 Microcosmus, Vol. II, pp. 346-7. 

10 Cf. King, The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life, pp. 201, 
204-10. 



The Philosophical Approach 113 

underlies all our thinking, all work worth doing, all our 
striving for character, and all earnest social service. 11 
From the religious point of view this'means that the 
assumption of God is practically the major premise of all 
our thinking. For, as I have elsewhere said: 12 Our only 
possible standard of truth is in our own constitution. In 
consequence, all proof of every kind moves on a double 
assumption: first, that the world is a sphere of rational 
thinking—must satisfy the intellect; second, that the 
world is a sphere of rational living—must satisfy the 
whole man. One might say that this double assumption 
is the heart of the intention of the so-called ontological 
argument for the existence of God, and suggests the two 
forms in which that argument may be stated, or the double 
interpretation of our necessary constant assumption that 
the world is a “rational,” or an “honest” world. To see, 
now, the fundamental nature of these two great assump¬ 
tions that underlie all our thinking and living, is really to 
see that the existence of a God of reason and love is so 
certain and fundamental a fact that it really has to be 
assumed in all thinking and living—a fact that cannot be 
proved just because it is the basis of all proof;—the 
postulate, without which we should ultimately be driven to 
give up altogether the possibility of rational thinking. 

Again a test of truth that has assumed great impor¬ 
tance in the development of modern science is the test of 
the working hypothesis , the verification of a theory by 
putting it to the test of actual practice. Will the 
hypothesis work? Does it fit into that reality that we 
have elsewhere found assured? Does it give us any 
rational whole in our experience? This pragmatic test of 
truth is that which Dewey emphasizes when he says: “By 

11 Cf. King, op. cit., pp. 181-186. 

M Op cit., pp. 204 ff. 



114 


Seeing Life Whole 

their fruits shall ye know them. That which guides us 
truly is true—demonstrated capacity for such guidance is 
precisely what is meant by truth.” 13 

Hocking believes that we should make a sharp discrimi¬ 
nation between negative pragmatism and positive prag¬ 
matism, and that the truth of pragmatism lies on the 
negative side: 

“The pragmatic test has meant much in our time as a 
principle of criticism, in awakening the philosophic conscience 
to the simple need of fruitfulness and moral effect as a 
voucher of truth. It is this critical pragmatism which first 
and widely appeals to the intellectual conscience at large. 
Negative pragmatism, I shall call it: whose principle is, e That 
which does not work is not true * The corresponding positive 
principle, ‘Whatever works is true,’ I regard as neither valid 
nor useful. But invaluable as a guide do I find this negative 
test: if a theory has no consequences, or bad ones; if it 
makes no difference to men, or else undesirable differences; if 
it lowers the capacity of men to meet the stress of existence, 
or diminishes the worth to them of what existence they have; 
such a theory is somehow false, and we have no peace until 
it is remedied.” 14 

Another test of reality is the test, to which we have 
repeatedly referred, of the whole man as the organ of the 
spiritual. This growing emphasis in our time on wholeness 
has many illustrations. An instance is found in Mc- 
DougalPs insistence that “even the most purely instinctive 
action is the outcome of a distinctly mental process . . . 
and one which, like every other mental process, has, and 
can only be fully described in terms of, the three aspects 
of all mental process—the cognitive, the affective, and the 
conative aspects; that is to say, every instance of instinc¬ 
tive behavior involves a knowing of some thing or object, 

u Reconstruction in Philosophy, pp. 156 ff. 

14 The Meaning of God in Human Experience, pp. xiii ff. 



The Philosophical Approach 115 

a feeling in regard to it, and a striving towards or away 
from that object.” 15 So Hocking makes his appeal to 
wholeness when he calls his philosophic view a “point of 
convergence,” and says: 

“It is the finished pragmatist who best knows the need of 
the absolute. It is the finished mystic who best knows the 
need of active life and its mediation. It is the finished idealist 
who best knows the need of the realistic elements of ex¬ 
perience; the mystical and authoritative elements of faith. I 
know not what name to give to this point of convergence, nor 
does name much matter: it is realism, it is mysticism, it is 
idealism also, its identity, I believe, not broken. For in so 
far as idealism announces the liberty of thought, the spir¬ 
ituality of the world, idealism is but another name for phi¬ 
losophy—all philosophy is idealism. It is only the radical 
idealist who is able to give full credit to the realistic, the 
naturalistic, even the materialistic aspects of the world he 
lives in.” 18 

Another common test that men instinctively apply is 
the test of many minds in the long run of human experi¬ 
ence. This is the test which underlies Lincoln’s often 
quoted statement on democracy, that you can fool all of 
the people part of the time, and part of the people all of 
the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the 
time. In spite of the herd instinct and its power and 
dangers, there is real value in this test of many minds. 

Another closely allied test is the test of great minds — 
minds with initiative, creative minds, recognized experts in 
given fields, authorities in the true sense. For, as we have 
seen in our discussion of the way into the great values of 
life, it is the geniuses, the great souls of large experience 
in a given realm, by whom we are naturally led to the best 
the race has yet achieved. 

15 Social Psychology, p. 26. 

19 Op. cit., pp. xix-xx. 


116 


Seeing Life Whole 

And both these tests, of the many minds and of great 
minds, connect themselves inevitably with the test of the 
historic trend of the progress of the race, the test of racial 
experience. In the light of the theory of evolution we 
have naturally come to conceive the great outstanding 
ethical standards and ideals of the race as to a large 
extent, at least, the outcome of racial experience. No 
doubt we must be on our guard against the static concep¬ 
tion of standards and ideals, and should not forget that 
conventions must change as ethical growth goes on. 
“Hence,” as Schiller says, “ ‘transvaluations’ must be 
regarded as normal and entirely legitimate occurrences in 
every sphere of values.” 17 And yet we cannot help 
drawing inferences from the historic trend of the race. 
But we need to be keenly alert, in the interpretation of 
history, against the bias that selects out such phenomena 
in history as will simply confirm a foregone conclusion. 

Another test of great value in the complexity of modern 
civilization is the test of the converging of many lines of 
fact and experience and thought. It was this test which 
Hocking was using in the definition of his own philosophi¬ 
cal viewpoint, and we are ourselves using this test in the 
method adopted of a sixfold approach to our general 
problem of a Christian philosophy of life. Where a num¬ 
ber of more or less independent lines of thought do tend 
to converge upon a conclusion, we rightly give great 
weight to the conclusion so reached. If, for example, 
historic, psychologic, scientific, philosophic, ethical and 
social emphases all point to a certain goal, that goal will 
rightly seem to us strongly verified. 18 

The very complexity of the world and of human nature, 

1T Article “Value,” Encyc. of Religion and Ethics, p. 588. 

18 Cf. King, The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life, pp. 165- 


The Philosophical Approach 117 

and growing experience in so complex a life, suggest that 
any extreme, one-sided view is pretty certain not to 
represent the full truth, but that there will surely be some 
balancing facts which must be taken into account. For 
the very unity of man’s nature means that it will certainly 
avenge itself for any disregard of any real part of its 
experience. This brings us to another test, especially 
suggested by psychology: tlie test of the paradox. The 
test of the paradox is really a part of the emphasis on 
seeing life whole; for it has grown up in universal human 
experience. Men have repeatedly found in many situa¬ 
tions in life that something like Hegel’s transcending syn¬ 
thesis is called for, that includes the truth of both sides 
of a practical paradox and brings both together. These 
paradoxes of course go back to the paradoxes in man’s 
own constitution: such paradoxes as self-assertion and 
self-surrender; as the stable and unstable types of men; 
as Christ’s great all-inclusive paradox of saving one’s life 
by losing it; and as the paradox of the necessary combina¬ 
tion in our life of both complexity and simplicity. We 
may well use the test of one of these paradoxes as applied 
to religion: the test of both likeness and difference; that 
religion, in the first place, if it is to seem most real to us, 
must be like those other realms of experience which have 
seemed to us most real; and, on the other hand, that 
religion must be different from all other realms, as having 
a certain uniqueness which cannot be spared, and therefore 
having an indispensable contribution to make to life. 
Both likeness and difference are necessary, in spite of the 
seeming paradox. 19 

James suggests a useful threefold test of opinions and 
experiences: immediate luminousness, philosophical rea- 

19 Cf. King, The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life, pp. 14- 
17; Cf. Sheldon, Strife of Systems and Productive Duality. 


118 


Seeing Life Whole 

sonableness, and moral helpfulness. This test of James’ 
is, of course, a direct appeal to the judgment of the whole 
man. 

There is a negative test also of truth or reality, which 
deserves to be included in this survey. The great achieve¬ 
ments of modern science have led some to regard the con¬ 
ceptions which underlie the mathematico-mechanical view 
of nature as though they were peculiarly real, the essen¬ 
tial realities of the universe, and to hold that they con¬ 
stituted the superior “hard facts” with which we have to 
do. But atoms are no more real than minds, or the fact 
that man has two appetites more real than man’s sense of 
truth, of goodness, and of beauty. The man who seeks 
the truth, who seeks reality, must be prepared to face the 
facts wherever those facts lie. 

Religion believes in these tests of truth and reality and 
has no occasion to shrink from them, for they are a part 
of her faith in God and in a world that is God’s world. 
She believes so fully in the whole man as the organ of the 
spiritual that she can have no quarrel with these many- 
sided tests of truth. 

3. Another point of view that helps to clearness in the 
philosophic realm is that of the three spheres of reality , 
the is , the must , and the ought. 

It is worth while to give Lotze’s full putting of this 
thought: 

“Our whole theory of the universe has three starting-points. 
We find within ourselves a knowledge of universal laws, which, 
without themselves giving rise to any particular form of 
existence, force themselves on our attention as the necessary 
and immediately certain limits within which all reality must 
move. On the other hand, we find within ourselves an in¬ 
stinct bidding us discern in Ideas of the good, the beautiful, 
and the holy , the one indefeasible end whence alone reality 


The Philosophical Approach 119 

derives any value; but even this end does not bring to our 
cognition the special form of the means by which it is to be 
attained. Between these two extreme points extends for us a 
third region — that of experience —boundless in the wealth of 
its forms and events, unknown in its origin. We can track 
into this wealth the universal Laws imposed on all phenomena. 
... In this wealth of reality we may also seek the radiance of 
those Ideas which give worth to all being and doing. . . . 
But the more, while endeavouring to fulfil one of these two 
tasks, we become absorbed in the details of Nature’s course, 
the more does Nature’s own originality again come to the 
front—the independent wealth of forms in which it envelops 
the universal and colourless laws of mechanism, and the self- 
will with which it carries out Ideas not always in what seems 
to us the shortest way, but by circuitous paths and in ac¬ 
cordance with general and far-reaching habits of working.” 20 

No one of these three spheres of reality can replace any 
other. Nor can we rid ourselves of any one of the three. 
And though we study incessantly the third region, that of 
experience—the is —for all possible light upon the must 
and the ought , if we are to be successful in thinking the 
world through into final unity, we shall all of us have to 
start in our final unifying statement with the ought , with 
the teleological view of the essence of the world. 21 The 
ought we have to think of as the ideal goal of the universe; 
but for its embodiment it requires laws, the must , and it 
requires also a given content, a certain matter of fact, 
the is. Three of the most influential philosophical minds 
of the generation just past, Lotze, Wundt, and Paulsen, 
agree that ethics must thus determine metaphysics; that 
the ought must determine the must and the is. 22 

4. It helps to clearness also to see that the ought , the 
ideal in the widest conception we have of it, is itself at 

30 Microcosmus, Vol. I, pp. 417-18. 

31 Cf. Lotze, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 719 ff. 

22 Cf. King, Rational Living, p. 166. 


120 


Seeing Life Whole 

least threefold, gathering, as a result of the experience of 
the race, around the three great ideals of truth , goodness , 
and beauty , which correspond to the three aspects of 
man’s ideal nature, and to three great realms of value: 
unifying intellectual values, ethical values, and esthetic 
values. And yet all belong indubitably together. These 
three may be said to make our great irreducible universe 
of the ideal. And the discernment and formulation of 
them are an expression of one of the surest and most 
significant insights growing out of the experience of the 
race. They may be said to constitute the great affirma¬ 
tions of religious faith, for they deal with a world of 
persons, and naturally look to an ultimate source not 
less than personal. As Streeter puts it: 23 

“The worship of God is not something different from the 
love of Humanity, the passion for the Beautiful, and the 
devotion to Truth; it is not something which exists alongside 
of these and in addition to them, it is what these actually are 
whenever and in so far as they are realised in their highest 
form, in their true co-ordination, and in their real meaning. 
Conscious worship of the Divine is not an extra, it is the 
summary and the explanation of every separate and depart¬ 
mental pursuit of the Ideal. And yet to say without further 
explication that Worship is merely the sum total of the love 
of Goodness, Beauty and Truth, all realised in perfect har¬ 
mony and proportion, is to leave out something essential. 
The love of Goodness means less than the love of God, unless 
we recollect that it must include not merely the love of the 
mother for the babe, but also that of the babe to the mother 
—reverence, gratitude, unqualified trust, as well as an ecstasy 
of self-devotion. The service of man is the most essential 
activity in the service of God, and the love of humanity is 
a necessary element in the love of God, but it is not the whole 
of it; and it only becomes the whole of it when directed 
towards that ideal Humanity which is for us the ‘image of 

33 Concerning Prayer, pp. 245-247, 249. 


The Philosophical Approach 121 

the invisible God.’ . . . The conception of Worship is that 
which co-ordinates and illustrates the three parallel aspira¬ 
tions of the human mind, the passion for Good, for Beauty 
and for Truth. . . . Thus devotion to Goodness, devotion to 
Beauty, devotion to Truth in the last resort can only coexist, 
can only each attain its true character, if the object of the 
individual’s own special interest is seen to be an expression 
of and a part of the Eternal Harmony which is above all, 
which is in all, and which is all. When this is consciously 
realised, and all the faculties are consciously and spon¬ 
taneously orientated in that direction, Worship in its highest 
form begins.” 

Men have been slow to grasp the full meaning of the 
race’s practically universal affirmation of these values of 
the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, as real and 
inescapable. Our minds are real facts, and their experi¬ 
ence and affirmation of truth, goodness and beauty are 
facts. The sense of value would go if faith in their 
objective reality vanished. That would make a thor¬ 
oughly irrational tvorld, meeting none of the highest tests 
of reality. Hoffding puts most compactly a single aspect 
of this necessary objectivity of truth, goodness and 
beauty: 24 “There are lines of evolution which have their 
end in ethical idealism, in a kingdom of values, which 
must struggle for life as all things in the world must do, 
but a kingdom which has its firm foundation in reality.” 

5. But an adequate philosophy, particularly in a 
scientific age, must do full justice to the mission of 
mechanism , 25 and it would be difficult to state that mission 
more concisely and justly than Lotze has done, in what is 
practically the thesis of his whole philosophy, 28 where he 

34 Evolution in Modern Thought, p. 222. 

28 Cf. Lotze, Microcosmus, Vol. II, p. 727. 

40 Microcosums, Vol. I, p. xvi. 


122 


Seeing Life Whole 

seeks to show “how absolutely universal is the extent and 
at the same time how completely subordinate the signifi¬ 
cance , of the mission which mechanism has to fulfil in the 
structure of the world .” In other words, “nowhere is 
mechanism the essence of the matter; but nowhere does 
being assume another form of finite existence except 
through it.” 27 On the one hand, it must be plain that 
mechanism is absolutely universal in extent; that agency, 
machinery, organization are always necessary; that 
nothing can take place in the realm of nature or spirit 
without means. And this insistence on mechanism’s abso¬ 
lute universality in extent corresponds to science’s funda¬ 
mental conviction of the universality of law. On the other 
hand, Lotze insists that mechanism is completely sub¬ 
ordinate in significance. It is means, not end, and its 
whole value lies in the end for which the means exist. For 
us all, a rational world requires such subordination of the 
machinery of the world. We need to know that values 
can conquer; that the universe is on the side of the * 
righteous will. The whole religious interest in the ques¬ 
tion of miracle, it should be noticed, however one deals 
with that problem, lies not in emphasis on isolated marvel, 
but at just this point: whether men can believe in the 
supremacy of the ideal values in the universe over the 
machinery of the universe. This is not a selfish grasping 
for our own little personal reward but for ground for 
faith in an honest world and in the character of God. 
“We regard as incomplete any philosophy which holds 
that good may vanish out of the universe unrequited.” 28 
It is well to remember, also, that even in natural science, 
machinery is not the whole; quality and content are also 
absolutely essential. In the emphasis, therefore, upon 

27 Microcosmus, Vol. I, pp. 399-400. 

28 Cf. Lotze, Microcosmus, Yol. II, p. 473. 


123 


The Philosophical Approach 

mechanism as, on the one hand, absolutely universal in 
extent, and, on the other hand, completely subordinate in 
significance, we are doing justice both to the real and to 
the ideal sides, and looking to a final philosophy of ideal- 
realism or real-idealism. 


IV 

In this survey of fundamental philosophical viewpoints, 
and in close connection with the consideration of the 
mission of mechanism, we need to return to the problem of 
the possible harmony of the two final questions concerning 
phenomena: the question of process, of immediate causal 
connection,—How did it come to be? which is the question 
of empirical science; and, second, the question of meaning, 
of ideal interpretation,—What does it mean? the question 
of philosophy and the ideal interests. One of these ques¬ 
tions is as real and as justified and as necessary as the 
other. As has been already pointed out, they supplement 
each other, and, in all preliminary inquiry certainly, have 
no quarrel with one another. But we cannot stop, of 
course, with a final irreconcilable dualism between the two. 
There must be ultimate unity. We cannot get on with a 
final denial of the unity of truth. An ultimately rational 
universe , that is , must be so constituted that the process 
shall not be so inconsistent with the meaning as to make 
ultimate unity impossible. The universe must be on the 
side of the ethical will, in the struggle for existence of the 
values for which it stands. That is, the universe must be 
so made that we shall have good grounds to believe that 
values will be conserved and will make progress. This 
means, in turn, that God’s purpose in the universe and in 
its constitution must be such as shall be in line with man’s 
own highest purposes, that man shall not be at endless 


124 


Seeing Life Whole 

cross purposes with himself. There could be no possible 
adequate religion otherwise. Even evolution feels that it 
must believe that while adaptation to environment does 
not always mean progress in a particular organism, in the 
large and in the long run it does mean progress. We 
could hardly else justify the evolutionary process of the 
world at all. 

What grounds for faith are there, then, for the ultimate 
harmony of process and meaning, of mechanism and 
values, of the mechanical and the ideal, of empirical 
science and philosophy? 

In the first place, science's universality of law, as Lotze 
says, must be taken as only a disguised expression of the 
unity of the Infinite, and so conceived it is both a scientific 
and a philosophic insistence, and we have no reason to 
expect final conflict between process and meaning. To 
like import Haering says: 29 “The more clearly the 
conception of science is grasped, the less, in the long run, 
can people fail to discover the limit to its domination, 
as supplied by itself, or the presence of other mental 
powers of the strongest kind; and the less can the desire, 
ineradicable in the human mind that is not distorted, for 
an ultimate conviction regarding the world as a unity, be 
suppressed.” 

We have also seen that in order to reach any final unity 
of the world, with its three realms of reality,—the is, the 
must, and the ought, —we must begin with the ought, with 
the ideal; for we cannot derive the ought from either the 
must or the is. But beginning with the ought, we may 
reach faith, at least, in an ultimate unity here. 

In the evolution process itself, also, the condition of all 
progress lies in the variations, which are not causally 
explained, that is, in individuality, and as evolution 

29 The Christian Faith, Vol. I, p. 162. 



The Philosophical Approach 125 

reaches man, in human individuality. Here, in the recog¬ 
nition of the significance of human individuality both in 
process and in meaning, the two come together, and give 
one once more an assurance of final unity. 

More and more, also, in the process of evolution we are 
compelled to recognize two aspects of reality from the 
beginning of life, the mental and the physical , mutually 
adjusted and ever interacting—an actual working unity 
at least. A philosophy which recognizes this “recognizes 
the facts of the case and does not delude the mind by 
offering a solution which is in reality no solution at all.” 30 
Where both aspects of man’s nature are recognized, it is 
plain that the mental becomes increasingly significant and 
powerful as the evolution goes on, and grows continually 
in the knowledge of the world and of life. The “matter,” 
too, with which we have to do, it is becoming increasingly 
plain, is no dead inert static stuff, but a dynamic energy 
of inconceivable power, a kind of “matter” that might 
well be called “of the nature of mind”; particularly since 
the only power we directly know from within is will 
power. 81 

Moreover, for the ultimate harmony of process and of 
meaning, of science and of philosophy, and particularly in 
the theistic interpretation of evolution, we have to recog¬ 
nize both the immanence and transcendence of God. For, 
if the religious point of view is to be taken at all, the 
world must be conceived as neither self-originating nor 
self-sustaining. For if God is necessary anywhere he is 
necessary everywhere. There are no breaks in the evolu- 

80 Outline of Science, Vol. II, p. 549. Cf. also Pratt on “a dualism 
of process and not necessarily of substance,” Matter and Spirit, 
pp. 183 ff. 

81 Cf. McDougall, Social Psychology, pp. 361-363: “Of the two types 
of process, we certainly understand the appetitive more intimately 
than the mechanical.” 


126 


Seeing Life Whole 

tion series where he is more necessary than at other points. 
Nor can God’s relation to the universe be conceived to be 
an external finite relation to the process of things. Rather 
must he be thought as in these processes, as the very soul 
of them. But, while this is true, no satisfactory religious 
conclusion concerning the * immanence of God can be 
reached without clearly recognizing that the immanence 
of God in the world of men must he conceived as in some 
respects of a quite different hind from that in all the sub¬ 
human world. For in the human world there are moral 
conditions to be observed—some genuine self-conscious¬ 
ness, and free moral initiative, that make personality and 
character possible. We are thus obliged to ask, in the 
case of men, for a kind of separateness from God that 
would not hold for the lower animals. It is not meta¬ 
physical separateness of being which is required in the 
case of man—all our being roots in God—but the sepa¬ 
rateness of man’s own self-consciousness and free moral 
self-determination. If these are guarded the real person¬ 
ality both of God and of man is guarded. As Martineau 
says, in presenting a similar view of God’s immanence in 
men: “Here is a holy place reserved for genuine moral 
relations and personal affections, for infinite pity and 
finite sacrifice, for tears of compunction and the embrace 
of forgiveness, and all the hidden life by which the soul 
ascends to God.” 32 

It is also to be noted that there is a certain “duplicity 
of the Infinite Being” at work in all finite forces, if they 
are to be regarded as real causes adequate to the situa¬ 
tion. 33 For the full cause is never really present for 
science, even in its strictly scientific investigations, in the 

“Quoted by McGiffert, The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas, p. 

220 . 

83 Cf. King, The Reconstruction of Theology, p. 64. 


The Philosophical Approach 127 

sense that by any possible analysis of the present stage it 
is able to prophesy the next stage independent of experi¬ 
ence. In such a situation both immanence and tran¬ 
scendence are demanded. 34 

The parallel emphasis on transcendence , which the 
unity of the scientific and ideal views require, may be 
taken at least to mean, in the first place, that we have to 
do with no finite God; that the infinite fulness of the life 
of God is not exhausted in his universe. Men must know 
God, that is, as something more and other than the 
evolutionary process of things and animals and men, in 
which God is. For worship and vital relation to God 
require another than oneself, however intimate the relation 
between the two may be. Otherwise the highest we know 
will be man, and Humanity necessarily becomes our god, 
as Frederic Harrison’s Positivism asserts. 35 

Pringle-Pattison thus sums up the necessity of both 
immanence and transcendence for a Christian view of God 
and the world: 36 “The immanent God is thus always the 
infinitely transcendent. The two aspects imply one 
another. A purely immanental theory means the denial 
of the divine altogether as in any way distinguishable 
from the human, and involves, therefore, the unqualified 
acceptance of everything just as it is. A theory of pure 
transcendence, on the other hand, tends to leave us with 
a ‘mighty Darkness filling the seat of power,’ for only so 
far as God is present in our experience can we know any¬ 
thing about Him at all. It is the immanence of the 
transcendent, the presence of the infinite in our finite 
lives, that alone explains the essential nature of man.” 
So Haering says: 37 “To be sure, the forms of our 

84 Cf. Microcosmus, Vol. I, pp. 382, 384. 

85 Cf. King, Reconstruction in Theology, p. 108. 

3# The Spirit, edited by Streeter, pp. 21-22. 

87 The Christian Faith, Yol. I, p. 351. 


128 


Seeing Life Whole 

thought are changing away from the transcendence of 
God, and are deepening in the measure in which we realize 
His immanence, rightly understood. But if the ultimate 
mystery is shifted to the soul of man itself, if the ‘God in 
man’s own heart’ is in man’s heart alone, real religion 
ceases, and all sorts of substitutes, chiefly esthetic, take 
its place.” 

And Anally, in this harmonizing of the scientific and 
ideal viewpoints, it is to be noted that even the so-called 
necessary truths are not to he thought of as a world 
above God , to which he must be subject, but only the 
eternal habitudes of God himself. This is neither to say 
with Duns Scotus that the truth is true and the good is 
good because God wills it; nor yet to say with Thomas 
Aquinas that God wills the true because it is true and the 
good because it is good. Both views alike assume the 
possibility of a fragmentary God, a God for whom at some 
time truth and goodness were not yet. We must rather 
say, God alone is the Eternal Being and absolute Source 
of all, always complete in the perfection of his personality; 
and therefore, what we call the eternal truths are only 
the eternal modes of God's own actual activity . 38 

v 

Two supplementary but vital considerations need 
emphasis in concluding our philosophical approach to a 
Christian view of God and the world. 

1. One of these considerations is to be found in the 
suggestion that one's own self is the best key one has to 
the understanding of the universe. For man is, after all, 
in a very real sense both microcosmus and microtheos— 

88 Cf. King, Theology and the Social Consciousness, pp. 212 ff. 


The Philosophical Approach 129 

the world in little and God in little—and therefore the 
best key to the understanding of both the universe and 
God. For one’s own self is the only bit of reality we can 
know from within, and hence know best, and becomes 
thence naturally our one best key to the understanding 
of the world both of nature and of human nature. Lotze 
is very emphatic in making the whole man in the entire 
range of his experience the key to reality, in this signifi¬ 
cant passage: 39 “The nature of things does not consist 
in thoughts, and thinking is not able to grasp it; yet 
perhaps the whole mind experiences in other forms of its 
action and passion the essential meaning of all being and 
action, thought subsequently serving it as an instrument 
by which that which is thus experienced is brought into 
the connection which its nature requires, and is experi¬ 
enced in more intensity in proportion as the mind is 
master of this connection.” 

This principle of ourselves as the key to the under¬ 
standing of the world means particularly, of course, that 
what we inevitably recognize as the highest in us must be 
taken as the best key we have to the understanding of 
God . If we are to have any adequate conception of God 
at all, it is plain that we cannot conceive him as less than 
the best in our finite selves. While, therefore, we shall 
not ascribe to God the limitations of our finite personali¬ 
ties, we shall be certain at least that he is not less than 
personal. And as we must believe that in us will is more 
than power, and love more than will, so we shall be sure 
that the highest in God cannot be less than that love 
which is highest in us. 

It is a similar line of thought that leads the modern 
philosopher and theologian to interpret essence no longer 
in terms of substance or stuff, but in terms of purpose, as 
89 Miorocosmus, Vol. II, pp. 359-360. 



130 


Seeing Life Whole 

we know it in ourselves. And this principle of the teleo¬ 
logical view of essence has important bearings upon our 
conception of God and of Christ, as well as upon our 
conception of our own significance. 

2. The remaining philosophical consideration needing 
special emphasis in reaching a Christian philosophy of 
life is that of a purposed seeming unreality of the spiri¬ 
tual life, as I have elsewhere pointed out. 40 For this 
seeming unreality there are undoubtedly certain plain 
removable causes in various kinds of misconceptions and 
in failure to fulfil necessary conditions; but there are also 
equally plain unremovable causes, due first of all to cer¬ 
tain definite limitations of our natures, but especially due 
to what may be called a purposed seeming unreality on 
the part of God , to insure respect for human personality. 
This explanation of the seeming unreality of the spiritual 
life began with Kant and is very important as throwing 
light on many questions difficult for religious faith. The 
principle, for example, throws a great new light on the 
whole dark problem of evil—our greatest natural obstacle 
to a satisfying religious faith. As I have previously said: 
Seeing how much is at stake in this reverent guarding, at 
any cost, of our moral initiative and of our individuality, 
we learn not to expect God to interfere, even when great 
evils threaten. The greatest evil, after all, would be that 
the conditions of genuine character should fail. We 
come even to rejoice that we live, in this time of our pre¬ 
liminary training, in a world in which the rewards of 
virtue do not seem to follow either immediately or cer¬ 
tainly. The natural and inevitable doubt which underlies 
for every man “the problem of evil” becomes, in the light 

40 The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life, especially pp. 141- 
155. 


131 


The Philosophical Approach 

of this far-reaching principle of reverence for personality, 
itself a cause of thanksgiving; for it insures that our 
righteous choices shall not be selfishly motived. We are 
glad that the genuinely unselfish choice seems so often to 
cut right athwart our own interests; for it means that our 
wills are not over-ridden. The very existence of the 
problem of evil makes possible our belief in the genuine¬ 
ness of the character of ourselves and of others. It is a 
heavy price that is thus paid, no doubt; but it is not too 
heavy for the priceless interests so guarded. We have to 
recognize on the part of God, then, something like a really 
purposed obscuring of the spiritual world. The seeming 
unreality of the spiritual life is a chief part of our moral 
and religious training. 

If these philosophical view-points now reviewed, with 
their emphasis on seeing life whole, are justified, we can 
get all the unity necessary in our view of the world, and 
religion will have ample room for existence and growth. 
Religion, indeed, becomes the natural culmination of our 
best thinking along many lines. 


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CHAPTER VI 

THE BIBLICAL AND CHRISTIAN APPROACH 

In facing the whole problem of a Christian philosophy 
of life, it is impossible to avoid careful consideration of 
the Biblical and Christian approach; for Christianity is 
no mere philosophical speculation, but a definitely histori¬ 
cal religion, using as a part of its literature the Old Tes¬ 
tament Scriptures, and building preeminently on the life 
and teaching of Christ. We need not seek in any way or 
degree to evade consideration of these historical relations 
of Christianity. Indeed, this historical basis may well 
become an element of great strength. 

At the same time the relation of Christian faith to the 
Scriptures involves some difficult problems, greatly need¬ 
ing clear solution. It is particularly true that questions 
of real difficulty for very many have naturally arisen from 
false conceptions of the Bible, because the facts of modern 
science could in many cases not be harmonized with the 
Biblical statements. One can only say, as honestly as he 
may, how these questions best come to him. 

In the light of the long history of conflict between reli¬ 
gion and science, it is highly important to see with 
President McGiffert 1 that “in all these matters the 
readjustment might have taken place naturally and with¬ 
out harm to anybody, had it not been for the notion that 
the Bible is an infallible authority upon all subjects, 

1 The Bite of Modern Beligious Ideas , p. 33. 

13 2 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 133 

taken together with the fact that like most other ancient 
documents it represents a world-view which the new scien¬ 
tific discoveries were showing erroneous at one point after 
another.” 

Thoughtful Christians, therefore, are forced to con¬ 
sider what view they are to take of the Bible, if they are to 
keep an open mind toward growing scientific knowledge 
on the one hand, and toward an equally honest study of 
the Bible on the other hand. 

The difficulties to be met really need just two things for 
their solution. In the first place, it needs to be seen, as 
has already been pointed out, that all questions of science 
strictly interpreted are questions of process, and at bot¬ 
tom cannot conflict with the questions of ideal interpreta¬ 
tion raised by religion; and that a careful study of the 
established facts of evolution shows that there is no diffi- 
' culty in a theistic interpretation of the evolution theory. 
We need not return to these aspects of the relation of 
science and religion. 

In the second place, if Christian people are ever to avoid 
the feeling of constant conflict between science and the 
Scriptures, there is need to go to the bottom as to what 
it is to be a Christian, and so what a Christian use of the 
Bible is. 


i 

What then is it to be a Christian? To that question, I 
suppose, the simplest and at the same time the funda¬ 
mental answer is: a Christian man is a man who means 
first and foremost to be a disciple of Christ. Why does 
a man take that position? That is, why do Christian 
people call themselves Christian at all? Simply because 
they believe that Christ is truly the supreme revelation of 
God and of the highest life open to men; that is, that 


134 


Seeing Life Whole 

they can get more light and help from Christ than from 
any other. The Christian man believes that the great 
outstanding claims of Christ upon the love and loyalty of 
men, as I have elsewhere said , 2 are these: that in him we 
have the best life, the best ideals and standards, the best 
insight into the laws of life, the best convictions, the best 
hopes, the best dynamic for character, the surest revealer 
of God, and the greatest persuasive of the love of God; 
and, therefore, “the most precious fact in history, the 
most precious fact our life contains.” The Christian man 
thus counts Christ as veritable Lord of his life. For it is 
the simple truth to say that in all the higher ranges of 
his life he literally lives by Christ, for his highest ideals, 
insights, convictions, motives, faiths and hopes he owes 
to Christ. 

The Christian man, now, with this conception of Christ 
is brought face to face with the Bible,—the historical 
Scriptures of his religion,—and confronts its challenge: 
Are you in dead earnest—as a Christian must be—with 
the Lordship of Christ? If you are, then you must assert 
his supremacy in the Bible—great as the Bible is—as well 
as out of it. You will not put all the rest of the Bible, 
Old Testament and New Testament alike, on a level with 
him; but you will rather insist that all else in the Bible 
must be tested by him—by his spirit. And only that 
which bears that test is in the highest sense Christian, 
and to be received by you as such. This is the Christian 
use of the Bible , and there is no other, just because it 
alone gives Christ his supreme plaee. And this Christian 
use of the Bible brings a great emancipation both to 
Christian living and to Christian thinking. One is no 
longer confused and hindered by the imperfect approaches 
to the spirit of Christ found in many parts of the Bible. 

* Fundamental Questions, p. iO/L 



The Biblical and Christian Approach 135 

He feels no obligation to defend anything in the Bible 
which is unworthy of the spirit of Christ or manifestly 
not true; for the obligation to be true to the truth is a 
part of essential loyalty to Christ. 

Now all this has nothing primarily to do with scientific 
theories of any hind. There is nothing in the teaching of 
Jesus denying a theistic interpretation of evolution. He 
is in truth not dealing with that sort of question at all— 
not with astronomy or physics or chemistry or biology, 
but only with religion, with a man’s highest relations to 
God and men. On the other hand, Christ’s teaching fits 
well enough into the idea of evolution, for example in the 
parables of the kingdom. As others, and especially 
Romanes, have suggested, Jesus’ teaching is almost as 
remarkable for what it does not say as for what it does 
say. His spiritual insight, sanity, and balance keep him 
from mixing the questions with which he deals with other 
questions of a very different sort. One might leave the 
matter right there. 

But the very interest which the Christian man has in 
Christ and in his teaching well-nigh compels him to under¬ 
take a genetic understanding of Christ and Christianity, 
—such as can be obtained most naturally through the 
Old Testament. And that means that he can hardly use 
wisely and to most profit the Scriptures of his religion, 
including the Old Testament, except by a thorough criti- 
cal, literary and historical study of the entire Bible ,— 
what our time has called higher criticism. The emphat¬ 
ically Christian use of the Bible thus itself leads to its 
critical study. There is imperative need of a very honest 
application to the Bible of the principles of historical and 
literary criticism. The difficulty for Christian believers, 
at this point, has almost wholly come, as has been said, 
from the notion that the Bible is an infallible authority 


136 


Seeing Life Whole 

upon all subjects, and from the fact that many have been 
making claims for the Bible that the Bible does not make 
for itself, and so have been rendering it impossible for the 
Bible to give the priceless help that it may readily give. 
It is highly important, therefore, to see the full meaning 
and bearing, for the Bible, of what is called “higher 
criticism.” 

Higher criticism 3 may be defined as a careful historical 
and literary study of the book to determine its unity, age, 
authorship, literary form, and reliability. The higher 
criticism of a book is thus, in the main, simply a pains¬ 
taking study of the book itself, to get at the facts about 
it. The inquiry in its entirety is evidently wholly legiti¬ 
mate and ought to be of value when applied to the 
books of the Bible as well as to any other ancient book. 
In its purity, then, it is to be noted, the higher criticism 
of the Old Testament, for example, is simply an honest 
inductive study of the facts about the historical revelation 
of God in order to determine, just as in a truly scientific 
study of nature, how God actually did proceed, not 
how he must have proceeded. Every Christian ought to 
desire to know just that. To such an inductive study, 
therefore, however thorough, no reasonable objection can 
be made. There is, however, one caution voiced by Pro¬ 
fessor E. F. Scott, whose liberality will not be questioned, 4 
which deserves careful heeding: “As we read not a few of 
the more recent books on the origins of Christianity we 
cannot but feel that the authors have lost sight of the 
result in their occupation with the process. They have 
much to say about sources and influences, about all the 
different phases of the development, but with the thing 
that developed they do not concern themselves.” 

8 Cf. King, Reconstruction in Theology, Chap. VIII, pp. 109 ff. 

4 The JVew Testament Today, p. 48. 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 


187 


ii 

1. In turning, now, to some of the present-day obstacles 
to a Biblical approach to a Christian philosophy of life , 
the doctrine that the Scriptures are inerrant on all sub¬ 
jects and equally authoritative throughout, must be 
squarely faced; for, as we have seen, it makes impossible 
a truly Christian view of God and his relation to men. 

The element of truth in this general position is the 
priceless value which the Scriptures have in enabling one 
to share in the most significant religious experiences of 
the race (for it may truly be called a record of the 
preeminent meetings of God with men), 5 and to get a 
genetic historical understanding of Christ and Christian¬ 
ity. And this value must never be lost sight of. 

But the view that all parts of the Scriptures are equally 
inspired and authoritative inevitably involves, in particu¬ 
lar, over-attention to the Old Testament , over-estimation 
of the Old Testament, and over-influence of the Old Testa¬ 
ment on our life and thought. Christian thought as a 
whole has never faced that fact. From the beginning 
of Christianity men have tended to give the Old Testament 
such an undue place, and this is still true for great 
multitudes, and leads to many un-Christian inferences. 
Dr. W. N. Clarke does not put the matter too strongly: 6 

The Old Testament is “sure to offer more than its rightful 
share. It is the larger book. It is more pictorial in its modes 
of representation than its companion. It is more anthropo¬ 
morphic, and more given to expressing truths by means of 
institutions. It thus excels in quick suggestiveness. . . . 

Moreover, in spite of all its lofty passages, the Old Testament 
is less spiritual than the New, and therefore less exact- 

6 King, Reconstruction in Theology, p. 156. 

•The Use of the Scriptures in Theology, pp. 13-14. 


138 


Seeing Life Whole 

ing. ... In a word, the Old Testament is such a book in 
comparison with the New that to over-exalt it is to unspirit¬ 
ualize theology. And as a matter of fact it has been over¬ 
exalted far. The third chapter of Genesis has been more 
influential upon the doctrine of sin than all the words and 
attitude of Jesus. The book of Leviticus has done more to 
give form to the doctrine of salvation than any single book 
in the New Testament. Legalism has entered theology 
through the open door, and found permanent lodgment in 
the doctrine of the atonement.” 


The doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, moreover, 
takes an external view of authority in the spiritual life, in 
its thought of the Bible as equally authoritative through¬ 
out, in a way that is quite contrary to the whole spirit 
of Christ’s life and teaching. For Christ’s whole desire 
is to bring his disciples into a genuine sharing in his 
own spiritual life—to convictions, ideals, faiths and hopes 
veritably born in their own experience with him,—not to 
allow them to rest back on any ancient say-so. 

The view trifles, too,—half unconsciously no doubt— 
with facts and with the sense of truth, in its insistence on 
putting all Scripture on a level and on affirming the 
unity of all. For this insistence—I think one must say 
—is manifestly not based on truth, and only the exigen¬ 
cies of an unwarranted theory force it on men. The 
fifth chapter of Genesis and the first nine chapters of 
First Chronicles, for example, are certainly not to be 
put on a level with the twenty-third Psalm and the Ser¬ 
mon on the Mount. It is not a light matter thus to trifle 
with the facts—with the truth—for that is a training in 
disingenuousness. As another has put it, “Truth, which 
implies reverence for fact, and even for what may seem 
trivial fact, is part of the very being of God, and therefore 
any cynical or easy-going indifference to truth is itself 



The Biblical and Christian Approach 139 

an obstacle to real fellowship with Him.” 7 “Let your 
yea be yea, and your nay, nay.” 

Moreover—what supremely concerns the Christian— 
the view of an equally authoritative Bible, as we have seen, 
denies the real Lordship of Christ in the Bible by putting 
all Scripture on a level with him. My complaint is not 
that the defenders of an equally authoritative Bible make 
too much of Christ, but that in reality they make far 
too little. Those who take this position should heed 
well what it involves. For as a matter of fact, by this 
very attitude they absolutely fail to give Christ anything 
like the place he merits, or anything like so large a place 
as do many of those whom they criticize for denying the 
divinity of Christ. This is no small error. It is time 
that this truth was pressed earnestly home upon all 
Christian men and women, for this doctrine of the in¬ 
errancy of Scripture, just because it makes all Scripture 
equally authoritative, makes it impossible to give Christ 
his real supremacy, whether in the Bible or out of it, and 
is therefore fundamentally un-Christian in the highest 
sense. 

Positively, then, the opposition to this claim for the 
inerrancy of Scripture and all that goes with that should 
mean several things. First, it means unhesitating accept¬ 
ance of the principles of the historical and literary criti¬ 
cism of the Scriptures. We cannot otherwise use the 
Scriptures as they ought to be used, or even defend them. 
A professor of the Bible in an Indian Christian college 
told me that in his Bible classes he taught Christian 
students and Hindu students separately, for he could 
not answer the questions raised by the Hindu students 
except on the basis of historical and literary criticism, 
and this critical position he did not feel at liberty to take 
T The Spirit, edited by Streeter, p. 166. 


140 


Seeing Life Whole 

in teaching the Christian students, on account of the op¬ 
position of other members of the faculty. In the second 
place, this should mean discriminating recognition of the 
limitations of the Old Testament. One of the great gains 
of the newer view of the Scriptures is that it requires 
discrimination in their use; it means a more genuinely 
spiritual method in spiritual things; for, as Drummond 
says, “Truth never becomes truth until it has been 
earned.” The setting aside of the doctrine of the in¬ 
errancy of the Scripture should emphatically mean, as 
we have seen, coming to a new and clear assertion of 
the Lordship of Christ in the Bible as well as out 
of it. 

The rational view of the Scriptures would also involve 
the application of the evolutionary point of view, though 
in no mechanical fashion, to the Scriptures as a record 
of the growing revelation of God on the one hand, and 
of man’s growing response to that revelation on the other. 
For it is impossible to put all the different stages of 
revelation in the Old Testament on a level or to assert 
that the order of time is in all cases the order of progress. 
And such a view of Scripture implies especially perceiving 
the progressive apologetic within the New Testament itself 
with its continuing help. As Scott points out in his 
Apologetic of the New Testament , we have been slow to 
see the great value, for example of the Johannine apol¬ 
ogetic and the help of its later date. The victory over 
Gnosticism, in Scott’s words, “has been described as the 
victory of sober reason over wild irresponsible speculation; 
but it was much more. It ensured that Christianity 
should continue as an ethical religion, appealing to all 
mankind, and not as an esoteric philosophy. It ensured 
also that through all its future developments the church 
should be anchored to its historical origins in the life 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 141 

andj death of Jesus Christ.” 8 This makes the New 
Testament Christianity emphatically ethical, universal, 
historical, and Christian. The Fourth Gospel “has per¬ 
ceived that Christianity is ultimately bound up with 
Christ himself—not with any work accomplished by Him, 
but with His own Person.” 9 

This historical critical study of the Scriptures gives an 
emancipated theology, and has still much of fruitful sug¬ 
gestion for theology. For example, light from the extra- 
canonical apocalyptic writings helps to relieve the tradi¬ 
tional Christian eschatology , as Rev. C. W. Emmet points 
out in his essay on The Bible and Hell. 10 

He defines the traditional view of hell as “any state of 
punishment, whether bodily or spiritual, from which there is 
no longer any prospect of the soul deriving any benefit, and 
in which it suffers without hope for itself or profit to others. 
Our strongest ground for the belief in immortality at all is 
our trust in the infinite Love of God and our conviction that 
in His Universe goodness must ultimately prevail; but the doc¬ 
trine that through all eternity there will continue to exist 
individuals suffering acutely in useless and hopeless agony 
is too cruel and too irrational to be compatible with that 
belief. . . . The traditional Christian teaching in this matter 
is very generally supposed to rest directly on the teaching 
of the Bible as a whole and of the New Testament in par¬ 
ticular. . . . It is the contention of this paper that this 
supposition is wholly erroneous. The recovery, during recent 
years, of a large number of lost Jewish apocalyptic writings 
has thrown an entirely new light on the exact nature of the 
problem contemplated, on the exact meaning of the terms 
employed, and on the history and origin of many of the ideas 
on this subject found in the Biblical writers. The net result 
of modern Biblical scholarship, with its application of the 
historical method commonly known as the higher criticism, 

8 Op. cit., pp. 180-181. 

9 Scott, op. cit., p. 207. 

10 Immortality, edited by Streeter, pp. 170-172, 212-213. 


142 


Seeing Life Whole 

combined with the light derived from these new sources, is 
to make it quite clear that the doctrine of hell in the sense 
in which that term was understood by our great-grandfathers 
is not to be found in the Bible at all. The Bible teaches, 
indeed, that the choice between right and wrong action is one 
which has eternal and abiding consequences. It is emphati¬ 
cally opposed to any belief that, do what we will, it will make 
no difference in the long run. What it does not teach is, that 
in the last and final result of things, there will still remain 
in the Universe beings suffering acute and everlasting torment 
in permanent rebellion against the Divine Will and forever 
rejecting the Divine Love.” 

The way in which the eschatological question has so 
largely dropped out of theological controversy is most 
significant. For more or less consciously that fact prob¬ 
ably reflects the immovable feeling that there is nothing 
in the teaching and revelation of Jesus so certain as his 
fundamental conviction of the infinite love of God as 
Father; and that no single passages or particular dif¬ 
ficulties of interpretation can set aside this never-to-be- 
doubted love of God. And no view of the future life which 
is inconsistent with this eternal tireless seeking love of 
God can be regarded as finally Christian. Or, as Emmet 
says, “It is our belief in the Fatherhood and love of God 
as revealed in Christ which makes the idea of unending 
torment strictly intolerable.” 10a 

The World War naturally brought into the foreground, 
especially in England, another eschatological question—• 
the question of prayer for the dead. And one may well 
wonder if it is not becoming increasingly doubtful whether 
Protestantism is justified in its complete rejection of 
such prayer. In another’s words, “The reaction of the 
Protestant mind against mercenary prayers and cere¬ 
monies to relieve the misery of the souls in Purgatory 
10a Op cit., p. 213. 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 143 

was healthy. But with this came in another supersti¬ 
tion, that it was wrong to pray for the dead or to believe 
in their fellowship with the living.” 11 

2. Another obstacle to a Biblical approach to Chris¬ 
tian life and thought is to be found in a prevalent extreme 
apocalypticism. 

There is an undoubted eschatological element in Christ's 
own teaching , and there ought to be if his teaching is to 
really meet the fundamental needs of men. This escha¬ 
tological element is to be found in the first place in the 
calm assurance which Christ has and gives of another 
life of fulness and of value. This will always be needed 
for any adequate Christian apologetic. In the second 
place, Jesus recognizes that another life is necessary if 
we are to be able to keep our faith in the justice and 
love of God. This demand for justice in God is the one 
great redeeming feature of the apocalyptic literature. 
As Glover puts it: 12 “In the apocalyptic books we have 
their philosophy of history, their conviction that funda¬ 
mental Justice is the secret of the universe, that present 
wrong will yet, by God’s providence, issue somehow in 
future right.” 

The most of the rest of apocalypticism should be 
sloughed off as simple unwarranted Jewish survival. Dr. 
Clarke’s language is justified: 13 “Visible advent, simul¬ 
taneous resurrection, assemblage of all men for judg¬ 
ment, millennial reign of Christ on earth,—all is Jewish 
survival, historically discredited by the work of Christ 
himself: it is a remainder from pre-Christian life and 
hope, demonstrated to be non-Christian by the different 

u Miss Dougall, Immortality, p. 292. 

13 Jesus in the Experience of Men, p. 101. 

**The Use of the Scriptures in Theology, p. 108. 



144 


Seeing Life Whole 

course of Christian history; wherefore it forms no part of 
Christian theology.” 

This literalistic premillennialism is contrary to the 
whole spirit of the teaching of Christ, for it reveals an 
essentially atheistic disbelief in spiritual forces and re¬ 
pudiation of them, yielding thus to a temptation which 
Christ himself rejected in the wilderness struggle. More¬ 
over, this literalistic premillennialism practically sets 
aside the whole social aspect of the kingdom of God, and 
makes meaningless Christ’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come, 
thy will be done on earth” 

3. Another obstacle to a Biblical approach to Christian 
life and thought is to be found in modern spiritualism. 

Spiritualism naturally took on a new lease of life during 
the World War, but has been singularly disappointing in 
its contribution to the religious life. Its chief value, 
so far, has been to have called out the activity of the 
Society for Psychical Research. Professor Leuba, who is 
sufficiently skeptical on points bearing on the spiritual 
life, seems to accept the evidence for something like telep¬ 
athy as adequate. He writes of psychical research: 14 , 
“The greatest accomplishment to record is the approxi¬ 
mate demonstration that, under circumstances still mostly 
unknown, men may gain knowledge by other than the 
usual means, perhaps by direct communication between 
brains (telepathy) at practically any earthly distance 
from each other. This dark opening is indeed portentous. 
It may at any time lead to discoveries which will dwarf into 
insignificance any of the previous achievements of science.” 
But with the acceptance of something like telepathy, it 
is to be noticed, a very large part, at least, of all 
“spiritualistic” phenomena would be explained. 

14 Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, article “Psychical Re¬ 
search.” 



The Biblical and Christian Approach 145 

A fairly sane attitude for Christian men and women 
not expert in psychical research has been thus phrased: 
U I a ni quite sure that at the heart of the universe lie 
order and reason and health—that God is the God of 
order and reason and health in all human affairs—and 
therefore I can, with a light heart, leave the investigation 
of alleged spiritualistic phenomena to expert scientists; 
I am quite certain that whatever turns out to be true will 
also prove useful to man and honoring to God.” 16 
Dabbling in seances is dubious business for those not 
trained in critical investigation. 

My own belief is that anything like a scientific proof 
of existence after death would be of very doubtful value 
to religion. We chiefly need a rational faith in another 
life,—not satisfaction of our curiosity concerning all 
kinds of details that would probably now mean little 
to us. 

Certain general considerations warn us not to expect 
over-much from modern spiritualism. In the first place, 
in the words of G. R. S. Mead, “In the demonstrations 
of spiritualism psychical capacity is notoriously unaccom¬ 
panied with intellectual ability.” In the second place, 
spiritualism seems to tend, in most cases at least, to a 
distinct lowering of the tone of the other life. Miss 
Underhill’s words are hardly too strong: “One of the 
most remarkable and distressing characteristics of spiri¬ 
tualism is the thoroughly unspiritual tone of its revela¬ 
tions.” Moreover, spiritualism almost completely ignores 
ethical values and seems to have practically no ethical 
impiilse. Here again Christ’s principle applies, “By 
their fruits ye shall know them.” A recent critic of spiri¬ 
tualism makes the interesting suggestion that its claims 
would put us back in the old maze of verbal inspiration; 

18 Immortality, p. 244. 


146 


Seeing Life Whole 

for she says: “If we believe that by these methods we 
obtain messages verbally dictated by departed souls, we 
have returned to a belief in verbal inspiration, and I 
wish to submit that all the difficulties with which we are 
familiar in believing that our Scriptures were thus in¬ 
spired are to be urged against any belief that our friends 
in the next world give verbally inspired messages to 
those who remain in the flesh.” 18 

4. Among present-day obstacles to a Biblical approach 
to Christian life and thought I fear must be included 
also Christian Science. 

In Christian Science we have one of the most anomalous 
phenomena of a scientific age, and we need to have in 
mind the appalling assumptions it makes. 

In the first place, Christian Science denies the scientific 
facts and laws of the world and repudiates all modern 
science, through which the conquest of material forces 
has come to pass. There is really no place for a scien¬ 
tifically educated man in Christian Science. It has not 
even any working hypothesis of its relation to science. 

Its “glossary” is an absolute repudiation of any pos¬ 
sible rational interpretation of the Scriptures. Nothing 
too harsh could be said of it as a method of reaching 
the truth of the Bible. It thus trifles with the sense of 
truth and with all possible evidence in most self-con¬ 
tradictory fashion. 

One of the most appalling facts for one who remembers 
Christ’s emancipation of his disciples from superstition 
and fear is that Mrs. Eddy brought back for her fol¬ 
lowers belief in all the horrors of witchcraft in her theory 
of “malicious animal magnetism.” She lived in fear of 
it herself and put others in fear of it. Her statement 

ia Miss Dougall, Immortality, p. 273. 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 147 

concerning it is unusually clear: “If the right mental 
practice can restore health, as is proven beyond a ques¬ 
tion, it is self-evident that a mental malpractice can 
impair the health of those ignorant of the cause and how 
to treat it.” 17 

But it is nevertheless to be said that in the conviction 
of healing , Christian Science has undoubtedly brought to 
many a sense of the reality of living relation to God ,— 
a vital religious conviction. And though Christian 
Science has terribly encumbered this simple religious fact 
with a false philosophy, a repudiation of science, and an 
impossible interpretation of the Bible, it has still brought 
to men a sufficient sense of the positive healing power of 
religious faith to help them to feel their way into some 
discernment of the spiritual conditions of health. The 
way this has come about with such new sense of power 
and reality is perhaps indicated by Rev. Harold Anson 
in his essay on Prayer as Understanding. 18 He believes 
that to many people with an inadequate conception of God, 

“the idea comes as new that, in worshipping God, we are 
really worshipping Goodness, Love, Life, Principle, and so 
on; it comes as a new strength and stay in life. To this 
newly discovered belief ‘Christian Science’ and similar re¬ 
ligious movements owe much of their influence and their power 
of regenerating character. Many people thus attain for the 
first time something of the calmness and balance of the man 
of science. They learn to believe that the results of co¬ 
operation with God’s purpose are as certain and accurate as 
the demonstrations of the laboratory. . . . Thus the idea 
of God as the abstract active principle of good does, as a 
matter of fact, bring to many in our own generation a new 
steadfastness in disappointment, and a confident assurance 
in the search after God which they did not possess before/’ 

17 Science and Health, 13th ed., p. 175. 

■“ Concerning Prayer, pp. 94-95. 


148 


Seeing Life Whole 

Science and Health , the Christian Science textbook, is 
singularly lacking in intellectual and spiritual insight, 
and the Christian church as a whole ought to be able 
distinctly to outbid Christian Science in true spiritual 
healing. For, as another has put it, the truly Christian 
spiritual healer “is seeking for a re-constitution of the 
soul more profound than that which the purely psychical 
healer is seeking.” 19 

5. Another obstacle to a Biblical approach to a Chris¬ 
tian philosophy of life is to be found in a false type of 
mysticism. 

A new wave of mysticism—partly at least due to the 
World War—seems to be sweeping over the world, and 
with such a movement there is grave need of some sharp 
discriminations between a true and a false mysticism. 
For there are some highly important considerations to be 
taken into account when one is trying to think his way 
through mysticism. 20 

The dangers of mysticism seem to me to be these: the 
tendency to make simple emotion the supreme test of 
the religious state; the tendency toward mere subjectiv¬ 
ism ; the tendency, therefore, to underestimate the histor¬ 
ical; a tendency toward vagueness, for mysticism nat¬ 
urally lacks positive content; the tendency toward 
Pantheism, underrating the personality both of God and 
of man; and the tendency to extravagant symbolism. 

On the other hand, the justifiable elements in mysti¬ 
cism at its best may be said to include: the insistence on 
the legitimate place of feeling in religion as a real and 
vital experience; the emphasis on one’s own conviction 
and faith; the real difficulty of expressing the full meaning 

19 Concerning Prayer , p. 34*9. 

30 Cf. King, Theology and the Social Consciousness , Chs. V and VI. 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 149 

of the religious experience; the demand for a complete 
ethical surrender to God; the faith in the real unity and 
worth of the world in God. 

Perhaps the best definition of what I have called false 
mysticism is this of Herrmann’s: 21 “When the influ¬ 
ence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in 
an inward experience of the individual, that is in an 
excitement of the emotions taken, with no further ques¬ 
tion, as evidence that the soul is possessed by God; with¬ 
out, at the same time, anything external to the soul being 
consciously and clearly perceived and firmly grasped, or 
the positive contents of any soul-dominating idea giving 
rise to thoughts that elevate the spiritual life, then that 
is the piety of mysticism. He who seeks in this wise that 
for the sake of which he is ready to abandon all beside, 
has stepped beyond the pale of truly Christian piety. 
For he leaves Christ and Christ’s Kingdom altogether 
behind him when he enters that sphere of experience 
which seems to him to be the highest.” The marks of a 
false mysticism, then, for Herrmann, are: that it is purely 
subjective; that it is merely emotional and unethical; 
that hence it has no clear object, and is abstract, un- 
rational, unhistorical, and so un-Christian. 

The greatest single danger of mysticism is probably 
the acceptance of the Neoplatonic theory, that the soul, 
in Nash’s words, “must pass into a state that is half a 
swoon and half an ecstasy before it can truly know God.” 
Now it must be squarely faced that this half-swoon and 
half-ecstasy, which both the Indian and Neoplatonic mys¬ 
ticism attain, may be produced by various forms of self¬ 
hypnotism, often markedly sexual, and even through ni¬ 
trous oxide gas intoxication. James calls attention to the 

21 The Communion of the Christian with God, 2nd English ed., pp. 
22-2 3. 


150 


Seeing Life Whole 

fact that nitrous oxide gas gives “the immense emotional 
sense of reconciliation.” The vital question, then, is not 
that of the reality of the experiences, but that of the real 
cause and significance of the experiences, and the only pos¬ 
sible test of this is rational and ethical. Once again one 
must apply Paul’s test of “the fruit of the Spirit.” 

There is grave danger, therefore, in much modern as 
well as ancient mysticism, of substituting an essentially 
unreligious and unmoral experience for a true Christian 
communion with God. Much of this mysticism has prac¬ 
tically no use for the historical Christ, except as a ladder 
by which the mystical experience may be reached. We 
do well, therefore, to call our thought back to New Testa¬ 
ment testimony upon this point. 

For example, Glover, 22 bears truthful testimony, I 
think, when he says: 

“Remark, at any rate, in the teaching of Jesus, that there 
is no mysticism of the type so much studied today. There 
is nothing in the least ‘psychopathic’ about him, nothing ab¬ 
normal—no mystical vision of God, no mystical absorption 
in God, no mystical union with God, no abstraction, nothing 
that is the mark of the professed mystic. Yet he speaks freely 
of ‘seeing God’; he lives a life of the closest union with God; 
and God is in all his thoughts. A phrase like that of Clement 
of Alexandria, ‘deifying into apathy we become monadic,* 
is seas away from anything we find in the speech of Jesus. 
That is not the way he preaches God. He is far more 
natural; and that his followers accepted this naturalness, and 
drew him so, and gave his teaching as he gave it, is a fresh 
pledge of the truthfulness of the Gospels.’’ 

And even a writer so sympathetic with mysticism as 
Professor Rufus Jones can say: 23 

” Th 4 Jesus of History, p. 89. 

u Oonoeming Prayer, p. 115. 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 151 

“The well-marked, sharply defined ‘mystic way’ which 
many mystics of the past have taken is esoteric and more or 
less artificial, not grounded in the inherent nature of the soul 
and not a universal highway for the whole race of the saved, 
though even here the experience of mystics, as a typical pil¬ 
grim’s progress, may be and often is illuminating. The ‘lad¬ 
ders’ of mystical ascent must be treated as parables of the 
way upward rather than as literal rungs and necessary stages 
of religious experience, and one feels how artificial they are 
when an attempt is made to fit the mighty life-experiences 
of Christ and of St. Paul and of the author of the Fourth 
Gospel into these mystical model-forms and to make them 
follow the ‘purgative,’ the ‘illuminative’ and the ‘unitive’ 
stages.’’ 

In the case of Christ, as Emmet says, 24 “there is a strik¬ 
ing absence of any claim to peculiar or abnormal modes 
of intercourse; we hear but little of ecstatic vision or 
mystic absorption. What Christ experienced was a close 
and unsullied union with His Father through the normal 
means which are open to every child of God.” 

in 

Turning now from these present-day obstacles to a 
Biblical approach to Christian life and thought, to a pos¬ 
itive setting forth of the Christian way of seeing life whole , 
I know no such significant illustration of the determined 
seeing life steadily and seeing it whole as is found in 
Christ’s answers to the wilderness temptations. Those 
temptations, on the eve of his public ministry, graphically 
pictured, gathered about the questions of the nature of 
his kingdom and the ways in which it was to be built up. 
The temptation to command the stones to be made bread, 
was the temptation to make the satisfaction of men’s 


* The Spirit, p. 317. 


152 


Seeing Life Whole 

physical wants the primary way to the upbuilding of his 
kingdom. The temptation to cast himself down from the 
pinnacle of the temple was the temptation to sweep men 
into his kingdom by dazzling marvels. The temptation 
of the vision of “all the kingdoms of the world and the 
glory of them” was the temptation to ruthless seizure 
of all power, as that to which he was entitled,—the funda¬ 
mental mistake of making means into ends. The kingdom 
by bread alone, the kingdom by marvel alone, the king¬ 
dom by power, by making means into ends,—all these he 
set aside. For Christ was fighting his way through to 
the fundamental principles of his kingdom. And in this 
great crisis of his life he illustrates and enforces the 
necessary wholeness of his kingdom , as against the three¬ 
fold temptations to a fragmentary and superficial one¬ 
sidedness . 

His kingdom is to be no makeshift, no trying to satisfy 
men with partial goods, no stopping on the surface, and 
no despising of any man’s nature. He must do justice 
to the whole man as God has created him. 

1. Christ’s answer to the first temptation is thus im¬ 
plicit in his reply to the others also: “Man shall not live 

hy bread alone , but by every word that proceedeth out 
of the mouth of God.” It is a broad illuminating prin¬ 
ciple and points to an open road. 

Keenly sensitive to the bodily wants of men and to the 
basic nature of those wants, Christ raises the question 
whether the satisfaction of those bodily wants is the 
primary way to the victory of his kingdom. Christ felt 
here the frequent temptation of the modern social worker. 
He saw clearly that the need of bread is a real need. 
The body is a genuine part of the nature of man. Christ 
had no quarrel with the modern realist in this. The sat- 


153 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 

isfaction of man’s fundamental hungers is necessary both 
to the life of the individual and of the race. 

Upon the hunger for food are built self-defense, in 
victory over the hardships and obstacles of life; self- 
support, through the dignity of work in which a man 
proves himself no parasite; and hence the self-respect of a 
true man, who has responded to the ancient prophetic 
challenge, “Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will 
speak to thee.” 

Upon the fact of sex have been built up through 
human history the beauty and glory of romantic love as 
western civilization has come to see it; the deep meaning 
and sacredness of family ties; the priceless values of the 
Christian home at its best. 

In the train of the urge for material comfort has come, 
too, much of the conquest of wretchedness and want and 
suffering and disease, and much, too, of the positive 
achievements of civilization. 

Moreover, Christ saw clearly that his doctrine was 
to be no asceticism. He had none of the celibate’s con¬ 
tempt for the body. On the contrary, he ministered joy¬ 
fully and continually to the bodies of men as well as to 
their spiritual natures. 

Man doth live by bread, then, but not by bread alone,— 
not alone by the satisfaction of physical hungers. Man 
is made on so large a plan that he may not think simply 
of physical hungers. Imagination and reason and 
ethical ambition and the sense of beauty have their hun¬ 
gers, too; and man may not abuse this trust of the whole 
of his nature, just as he must not abuse the trust of his 
physical nature. 

Our generation needs this wholesome breadth of Christ’s, 
as against a narrow, one-sided emphasis in much of our 
current fiction, upon sex, and upon a frank, definitely 


154 


Seeing Life Whole 

anti-Christian paganism that has no use for morals and 
no respect for the experience of the race. 

The case has rarely been put more clearly and discrim¬ 
inatingly than by one of our soundest critics, the editor 
of The Literary Review , 25 in his criticism of the 
English novelist Mr. D. H. Lawrence. A clear vision 
just here is so demanded for the health of our time as 
quite to justify the inclusion of some of Mr. Canby’s 
trenchant sentences: 

“With rare exceptions, Lawrence’s characterizations turn 
upon the possession, or the lack, or the perversion, of the sex 
instinct. His men and women are consistently bedevilled by 
sex, and in his philosophizing so is he. For him, sex not 
merely interpenetrates the living world, which is true, but 
overshadows it, which is by no means often or necessarily 
true. ... Now our race may have often denied sex to their 
own hurt or ignorantly miscalled its manifestations by the 
names of hate, religion, irritability, courage, ambition, or 
wrath; but the age-long insistence of the wise upon keeping 
the sensual in its place and restraining passion by reason was 
not utterly void of sense, nor has human experience through 
the Christian ages gone for naught. . . . It is more than 
curious to list the novels of the last two years—particularly 
the first novels—of younger men and women, and to see how 
prevailingly egoism, self-development at all costs, ruthless¬ 
ness, and the selfish generally are lauded by illustration and 
philosophically implied. . . . This uninhibited ego is the 
ambition of many in our times, and in Lawrence they find it 
frankly, discriminatingly apotheosized.” 

Mr. Lawrence’s conclusion is: “‘We must either love, or 
rule,’ and when love wears out, it will be rule, or obey.” 

Upon this conclusion Mr. Canby pertinently remarks: 

“Well, this may be true, and only slavery or masterfulness 
may be able to save us from sex. Perhaps altruism, perhaps 

"June 3, 1922. 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 155 

love, as we knew it, is bankrupt. Perhaps liberalism and the 
release of energies which it offered was a dream. Perhaps 
the ethics of Christianity were futile and are now obsolete. 
But it will take more than a powerfully saturnine novelist to 
convince us. Lawrence’s liberals are singularly arid and futile, 
his Christians are mere pious platitudes. The only vigor in 
his books is a selfish vigor, the only intensity springs from 
sex. ... As an analysis of a shell-shocked society I find 
all this excellent. As a world philosophy it seems morbid 
moonshine, the reflections of frightened men running from 
passion to take shelter in power.” 

Man doth not live, then, by bread alone, “but by every 
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Every 
creative utterance of God, every revealing word, every 
expressed purpose, every fibre of man’s God-given nature, 
every implanted instinct,—-all this is a part of life for 
man. None of it may be left out of account. 

2. In the second temptation Christ asks: If the kingdom 
is not primarily to come by bread, by the answer to even 
real physical needs, is it to come by giving men over¬ 
whelming emotional experiences , by mystery and marvel 
and ecstasy? 

Passion and religion have much that is akin. Both 
have often appealed to the overwhelming emotional ex¬ 
perience, tending to sweep men off their feet, as its own 
unquestionable justification. Men feel in any form of 
ecstasy a kind of “divine fire,” for they feel that they are 
living intensely. There is a large element of truth here. 
The thrill of passion, the thrill of beauty in nature and 
art and music, the thrill of discovered truth, the thrill of 
creative activity, the thrill of duty squarely faced and 
done, the thrill of felt identity with God,—these are all 
somehow akin to the divine, and all need to be taken into 
due account. 


156 


Seeing Life Whole 

It is natural, therefore, that the religious leader should 
be tempted to ask: Cannot I bring such marvelous ex¬ 
hibition of the power of God as will sweep men perforce 
into the kingdom; as will make it impossible for men to 
doubt the reality of God and relation to him; as shall 
make men say to themselves, “This is so marvelous that 
it must be divine, and nothing else is of any account 
compared with it”? Here the sense of God is felt as 
the enthralling power of a great personality. 

Now here again one may well say, “Yes, man shall live 
by mystery and marvel and ecstasy. We may well believe 
that the wonders of the telescopic and microscopic world 
are only poor illustrations of the wonders of the experi¬ 
ences which God may give the soul with him. “Things 
which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered 
not into the heart of man, whatsoever things God prepared 
for them that love him.” 

Feeling and wonder do have their great place in the 
life of man. So fundamental is feeling that the sense 
of reality everywhere requires feeling. And in wonder 
both philosophy and religion begin. Religion cannot 
live in a world in which there is not n^stery. 

Man shall live by mystery and marvel and ecstasy, 
but, once more, not by these alone, and not by a nar¬ 
row range of these, “but by every word that proceedeth 
out of the mouth of God.” The one-sidedness of mystery 
and marvel and ecstasy is revealed in their lack of ethical 
content, as we have already seen. 

Only through the whole man,* through the relation of 
the entire personality, with deep sense of the sacredness 
and ethical obligations of the personal relation, in which 
alone the whole man can be expressed, can the full life of 
man come. For we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that 
there is a very ugly element of selfish, ruthless treachery 


The Biblical and Christian Approach 157 

in the personal relations of those who make supreme the 
emotional simply as such. Indeed, emotional experience 
itself cannot mean most without its thoughtful interpre¬ 
tation by the intellect and the whole-hearted choice of the 
will. Without this response of the entire personality there 
can be no adequate revelation of God, no adequate king¬ 
dom of God. The full revelation of God even in the 
beauty and glory of nature can only come where the 
whole man is made the organ of the spiritual, as Bliss 
Carman illustrates in his “Vestigia” :* 

I took a day to search for God, 

And found Him not. But as I trod 

By rocky ledge, through woods untamed. 

Just where one scarlet lily flamed 
I saw His footprint in the sod. 

Then suddenly, all unaware, 

Far off in the deep shadows, where 
A solitary hermit thrush 
Sang through the holy twilight hush— 

I heard His voice upon the air. 

And even as I marveled how 
God gives us Heaven here and now. 

In a stir of wind that hardly shook 
The poplar leaves beside the brook— 

His hand was light upon my brow. 

At last with evening as I turned 
Homeward, and thought what I had learned 
And all that there was still to probe— 

I caught the glory of His robe 
Where the last fires of sunset burned. 

Back to the world with quickening start 
I looked and longed for any part 
In making saving Beauty be . . . 

And from that kindling ecstasy 
I knew God dwelt within my heart. 

* Quoted by the kind permission of Bliss Carman. 


158 


Seeing Life Whole 

3. In Christ’s answer to the third temptation he is 
facing another typically partial good. If God’s kingdom 
and man’s is not to come primarily by relief of physical 
need, nor by mystery, marvel and ecstasy, then is it to 
come by direct domination of the world’s kingdoms and of 
their glory and authority? Is it to come hy power , by 
making means into ends? Is the founder of the kingdom 
to be a world conqueror, a monopolizer of world power? 
Nietzsche succumbs to some such temptation as that for 
his superman. The position is an essentially irreligious 
one, for it has lost its faith in the efficacy of spiritual 
forces. 

Still in any case these great human constructions of 
the State—economic, political, scientific—have their 
place. They are inevitable fields of human endeavor, cor¬ 
responding to many-sided needs of men. By these men 
shall live, but not by these alone. There is not only need 
that they should have the right spirit in them, but it is 
further true that governments and institutions and forces 
do not exist for their own sakes. They are means, not 
ends. They are made for man, not man for them. 
Like the machinery of the universe, they must be subor¬ 
dinate to the great ends of God. They must be tested 
at every step by their service to men and by their rever¬ 
ence for men’s personalities. Even Plato and Aristotle 
could put slavery into the foundation of their ideal State, 
but the Christian centuries have made that, at least, im¬ 
possible. The place of governments and institutions is 
therefore a subordinate place. When they are made ends 
in themselves the relative goods take the place of the su¬ 
preme goods; things dominate persons; monstrosities take 
the place of normal life values; and the devil replaces 
God, and says falsely to the soul, “All these things will 
I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” 



The Biblical and Christian Approach 159 

That is what we do, when we stop in mechanism, when we 
make means into ends. 

The world-devastating war should have demonstrated 
for us all the utter futility of a nation or a civilization or 
a world whose roots go not deeply down into the spiritual. 
For, as Kennedy—in his drama, The Terrible Meek — 
makes his Roman Captain say at the crucifixion: 

“We go on building our kingdoms—the kingdoms of this 
world. We stretch out our hands, greedy, grasping, tyran¬ 
nical, to possess the earth. Domination, power, glory, money, 
merchandise, luxury, these are the things we aim at; but what 
we really gain is pest and famine, grudge labour, the en¬ 
slaved hate of men and women, ghosts, dead and death¬ 
breathing ghosts that haunt our lives forever. It can’t last: 
it never has lasted, this building in blood and fear. Already 
our kingdoms begin to totter. Possess the earth! We have 
lost it. We never did possess it. We have lost both earth 
and ourselves in trying to possess it; for the soul of the earth 
is man and the love of him, and we have made of both, a 
desolation.” 

We have been putting relative goods into the place of 
absolute goods, national selfishness for love—means for 
ends. 

All the temptations of the wilderness have suggested a 
partial kingdom, as Jesus clearly saw: a kingdom by 
bread alone, a kingdom by marvel and ecstasy alone, a 
kingdom by power alone—where means have become ends. 
But the real kingdom of God must include all goods and 
must measure up to God’s complete revelation of himself 
in all the universe, inner and outer; must measure up to 
the infinity of the creative Source of all. It must be 
tested by the quality of the spirit of God himself. 

Let a man honestly ask himself where the secret of 
humanity, the secret of the world’s life lies. Can he get 



160 


Seeing Life Whole 

closer to it anywhere than in the spirit of Christ, as 
Kennedy declares ? The prophetic voice says to Mary on 
the wind-swept hill of the cross: 

“I tell you, woman, this dead son of yours, disfigured, 
shamed, spat upon, has built a kingdom this day that can 
never die. The living glory of him rules it. The earth is his 
and he made it. He and his brothers have been moulding 
and making it through the long ages: they are the only ones 
who ever really did possess it: not the proud, not the idle, 
not the wealthy, not the vaunting empires of the world. 
Something has happened up here on this hill today to shake 
all our kingdoms of blood and fear to the dust. The earth 
is his, the earth is theirs, and they made it. The meek, the 
terrible meek, the fierce agonizing meek, are about to enter 
into their inheritance.” 

In his parable of the last judgment, Jesus makes the 
Son of Man say to those who have been characterized by 
the tireless spirit of unselfish, serving love: “Come ye 
blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for 
you from the foundation of the world.” Yes; for the 
whole universe enters into the completed kingdom of God. 
For in man’s redemption lies the redemption of the whole 
world. “For the earnest expectation of the creation 
waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God.” “For the 
creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of 
corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of 
God.” 


INDEX 


Anson, Harold, 147 
Apocalypticism, a prevalent ex¬ 
treme, 143-4 

Apologetic, need of a new, 1 ff. 
Arnold, Matthew, 5, 107 
Augmentation of Value, 108 
Authority, an external view of, 

138 ff. 

Behaviorism, 32 ff. 

Best, staying persistently in the 
presence of the, 68 ff. 

Beauty, goodness, truth, the three 
great ideals of, 119 
Biblical and Christian approach, 

132 ff. 

Bosworth, Edward I., 57 
Brent, Bishop, 97 
Brook, Richard, 69 
Browning, Robert, 74 

Canby, 154-5 
Carman, Bliss, 157 
Carpenter, 51 
Carruth, W. H., 28 
Christian, definition of, 133 ff. 
Christian Science, 146-8 
Christian use of the Bible, 134-5 
Clarke, W. N., 137, 143 
Conklin, 27 

Contempt, the spirit of, 97-8 
Converging of many lines of 
thought, the test of, 116 ff. 
Cou&sm, dangers of, 42 
Croly, Herbert, 17 

Danger of making means into 
ends, 158 ff. 

Dewey, 42, 109, 113 
Doctrine of the inerrancy of the 
Scriptures, 137 ff. 

161 


Dougall, Miss, 146 
Du Bois, Patterson, 90 

Emmet, C. W., 141 
Emotional one-sidedness, 155 ff. 
Eschatology, relieving the tradi¬ 
tional Christian, 141-2 
Eucken, 15 

Fears and anxieties, the Christian 
mastery of, 47 ff. 

Fiction, some tendencies in mod¬ 
ern, 154-5 

Freedom of investigation, re¬ 
ligion need not object to, 22-3 
Friendships, the highest test for, 
in reverence for personality, 
101 ff. 

Glover, 107, 150 

God as the major premise of all 
our thinking, 113 
God, the will of, revealed in two 
ways, 36 ff. 

God, transcendence and imma¬ 
nence of, 125 ff. 

Goodness, truth, beauty, the three 
great ideals of, 119 ff. 

Great minds, the test of, 115 

Haering, 124, 127 
Herrmann, 149 
Higher criticism, 135-6 
Hocking, 95, 114, 115 
Hoffding, 4, 121 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 96 
Honesty, 62 ff. 

Human society, creation of a 
higher type, 16 ff. 

Huxley, 36 



162 


Index 


Immanence and transcendence of 
God, 125 ff.; the necessity of 
both for the Christian view of 
God in the world, 127-8 
Individuality, the miracle of, 87-8 
Influence and domination, 99-100 
Ingelow, Jean, 81 
Intimacy of friendships to be 
guarded, 96-7 

James, 74, 92, 100, 105, 107, 117 
Jesus, 19, 40, 50 
Jevons, 107 
Jones, Rufus, 150-51 

Kennedy, 159, 160 

Leuba, 144 

Lordship of Christ in the Bible, 
often denied, 139 
Lotze, 112, 118, 121-2, 129 

Man as the image of God, 24 
Many minds, the test of, 115 
McDougall, 29, 73, 76, 83, 114 
McGiffert, 18, 132 
Meaning and process, questions 
of, 10-11; the possible harmony 
of, 123 ff. 

Means, danger of making into 
ends, 158 ff. 

Mechanism, the mission of, 121- 
23 

Mill, John Stuart, 83 
Modern Psychology, great prac¬ 
tical inferences from, 37 ff.; 
these inferences indubitably 
Christian, 40-41 

Modern science, contributions of, 
to the ideal interests, 11 ff. } 
13 ff. 

Modesty, 65 ff. 

Miinsterberg, 31 

Mysticism, a false type of, 148 ff. 
Nash, H. S., 16 

Natural ills, the conquest of, 
47 ff> 

Necessary truths as eternal 
modes of God’s activity, 128 


Old Testament, overattention to, 
137 ff. 

One’s own self the key to the 
universe, 128-9 

Organic view of truth, 110 ff. 

Paradox, the test of, 117 
Paul, 68 
Paulsen, 10, 119 
Personal association, 70 ff. 
Personal and ethical approach, 
75 ff. 

Personal relations, our whole con¬ 
stitution looks to, 78 ff. 
Philosophical approach, 104 ff. 
Philosophic points of view, fun¬ 
damental, 110 ff. 

Philosophy, definition of the 
sphere of, 106 ff.; relation to 
the special sciences, 107-8; ten¬ 
dency to underrate, 104 ff. 
Physical, the place of, in life, 
152 ff. 

Pragmatism, negative and posi¬ 
tive, 113-14 
Pratt, 32 

Prayer for the dead, 142-3 
Premillennialism, literalistic, 143-4 
Present-day obstacles to a Bib¬ 
lical approach to a Christian 
philosophy of life, 137 ff. 
Pringle-Pattison, 127 
Process and meaning, questions 
of, 10-11; the possible harmony 
of, 123 ff. 

Providence, faith in God’s, 50 
Psychology, definition of, 29 ff. 
Psychology of power, 43-4 

Reality, the three spheres of, 
118 #\; the is, the must, and 
the ought, 118 ff. 

Religion, positive gains for, from 
evolution, 26 ff. 

Religious faith and evolution, 
19 f. 

Respect for the liberty of others, 
necessary for one’s own char¬ 
acter, 88-9; necessary for one’s 
own influence, 89 ff.; needed in 




Index 


163 


all personal relations, 91-2; 
necessary for happiness, 92 ff. 

Respect for others, 88 ff.; in¬ 
cludes respect for the liberty 
of others, 88 ff. ; includes rever¬ 
ence for the sanctity of others’ 
inner personality, 94 ff. 

Revelation of the will of God, in 
the life and teaching of Jesus, 
36; in man’s nature, 36 

Reverence for personality, 75 #\; 
includes self-respect, 80 ff. 

Reverence for the sanctity of 
others’ inner personality, 94 ff. ; 
necessary for influence, 98 ff. ; 
necessary for happiness, 100 ff. 

Schiller, 53 

Schmid, 25 

Science’s threefold self-restric¬ 
tion, 21 

Scientific approach, 8 ff. 

Scientific method, 9, 15 ff. 

Scientific spirit, 8, 18-19 

Scott, E. F., 136, 140 

Seeing life whole, 4<ff.; the Chris¬ 
tian way of, 151 ff. 

Seeming unreality of the spiritual 
life, 130-31 

Self-mastery, problem of, 44 ff. 

Self-respect, included in rever¬ 
ence for personality, 80 ff .; 
affects our respect for others 
also, 82 ff. ; necessary for influ¬ 
ence, 85 ff .; necessary for hap¬ 
piness, 86 ff. 

Services, only two supreme, to 
render, 58 


Solitariness of the human soul, 
94-6 

Spiritualism, 143-6 
Spiritual life, purposed seeming 
unreality of, 130-31 
Stevens, James, 49-50 
Streeter, 108, 120, 138-9 

Thomas, Norman, 5 
Thomson, J. Arthur, 27 
Thomson and Geddes, 21-2 
Three great ideals of truth, 
goodness and beauty, 119 ff. 
Transcendence and immanence of 
God, 125 ff. ; the necessity of 
both for the Christian view of 
God in the world, 127-8 
Truth, goodness, beauty, the three 
great ideals of, 119 ff. 

Truth or reality, tests of, 111 ff. 

Value, the place of, in philoso¬ 
phy, 53 ff. 

Values, a relation to personality 
inherent in all, 55; introduction 
to, 56 ff.; of life, the way to 
them all essentially the same 
way, 55 

Waggett, 26 

Whole man, the organ of the 
spiritual, 114 ff. 

Witness, qualities of an effective, 
58 ff. 

World, larger and more signifi¬ 
cant, 14 ff. 

Worship as involving truth, good¬ 
ness and beauty, 120 ff. 























































































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